Martin Hirst On Trotsky, Orwell, Neo-Nazis, Far-Right Goons and Yours Truly
AUT journalism academic, Martin Hirst has been posting about my posts on him at his blog Ethical Martini;
Check this one out here
A few posts ago I mentioned the Journalism Matters conference recently held in Wellington and the response from the Dominion Post/Press [Christchurch] columnist Karl Du Fresne. My response was published today in The Press. It is this that led Trevor Louden to me and the blog he loaded up earlier today too (linked in an earlier post here).
If Louden's ignorant slather is supposed to shut me up, or intimidate me (which is how these thugs work), he needs to know that I am not afraid. In fact, it's interesting that what I wrote has caused him to froth at the mouth. Du Fresne had a similar reaction during our initial meeting in Wellington.
Why are these conservative types so scared of Marxists like me? Is it because I have a reputation for sneaking into homes and eating children? I don't think so. Rather, it's because they can't address or refute the logic of materialism, and so they have to get down and dirty -- attack rants are easier to digest than formal, considered arguments.
This one here
Well, I've been outed! Some neo-nazi goon has me lined up in his beady little eyes (see picture)
this is him in his own words:
Trevor Loudon
About Me
I'm a libertarian and ACT Party member from Christchurch. I believe in freedom with responsibility, not freedom from responsibility. My ideal society is one in which government is slashed to the bone and people are free to reach their potential. To achieve more freedom I believe in working with all those who are moving in broadly the same direction. The views expressed in this Blog are strictly my own
Why do these people insist on using the word "libertarian" to describe their politics. They don't actually believe in liberty at all. The idea that you can "slash government to the bone" and leave people free to "reach their potential" in a global capitalist economy is just fairytale rubbish.
Libertarians are to politics what the flat-earth crowd are to science.
This one here
This is an interesting rant from some far-right goons in GodZone, I feel like I've arrived on fucking Mars! Not really, as my mate Helen pointed out. It's not a bad place at all. Just got the same quota of loony-tunes as any where else really.
If you bother to read the thread I've linked to you'll see that the rampant revisionism of the right regarding Orwell is in full swing. In fact Orwell was basically a Trot. If you read Goldstein's "The Principles of Oligarchical Collectivism" in the centre pages of Nineteen Eighty-four, you'll clearly see that he was elucidating a theory of state capitalism.
Good to see our journalistic standards are in safe hands.
Keep digging Dr Hirst. Remember Paul Buchanan.
Check this one out here
A few posts ago I mentioned the Journalism Matters conference recently held in Wellington and the response from the Dominion Post/Press [Christchurch] columnist Karl Du Fresne. My response was published today in The Press. It is this that led Trevor Louden to me and the blog he loaded up earlier today too (linked in an earlier post here).
If Louden's ignorant slather is supposed to shut me up, or intimidate me (which is how these thugs work), he needs to know that I am not afraid. In fact, it's interesting that what I wrote has caused him to froth at the mouth. Du Fresne had a similar reaction during our initial meeting in Wellington.
Why are these conservative types so scared of Marxists like me? Is it because I have a reputation for sneaking into homes and eating children? I don't think so. Rather, it's because they can't address or refute the logic of materialism, and so they have to get down and dirty -- attack rants are easier to digest than formal, considered arguments.
This one here
Well, I've been outed! Some neo-nazi goon has me lined up in his beady little eyes (see picture)
this is him in his own words:
Trevor Loudon
About Me
I'm a libertarian and ACT Party member from Christchurch. I believe in freedom with responsibility, not freedom from responsibility. My ideal society is one in which government is slashed to the bone and people are free to reach their potential. To achieve more freedom I believe in working with all those who are moving in broadly the same direction. The views expressed in this Blog are strictly my own
Why do these people insist on using the word "libertarian" to describe their politics. They don't actually believe in liberty at all. The idea that you can "slash government to the bone" and leave people free to "reach their potential" in a global capitalist economy is just fairytale rubbish.
Libertarians are to politics what the flat-earth crowd are to science.
This one here
This is an interesting rant from some far-right goons in GodZone, I feel like I've arrived on fucking Mars! Not really, as my mate Helen pointed out. It's not a bad place at all. Just got the same quota of loony-tunes as any where else really.
If you bother to read the thread I've linked to you'll see that the rampant revisionism of the right regarding Orwell is in full swing. In fact Orwell was basically a Trot. If you read Goldstein's "The Principles of Oligarchical Collectivism" in the centre pages of Nineteen Eighty-four, you'll clearly see that he was elucidating a theory of state capitalism.
Good to see our journalistic standards are in safe hands.
Keep digging Dr Hirst. Remember Paul Buchanan.
posted by Trevor Loudon at
8/24/2007 01:31:00 PM
16 Comments:
Martin Hirst wrote: "Why do these people insist on using the word "libertarian" to describe their politics. They don't actually believe in liberty at all. The idea that you can "slash government to the bone" and leave people free to "reach their potential" in a global capitalist economy is just fairytale rubbish."
"Freedom is so precious it must be rationed" -- VI Lenin
The [self-] justification of wannabe totalitarian tyrants everywhere throughout history.
No doubt this ignoramus knows little of the intellectual pedigree of his "progressive" ideas.
In fact, this world view is so old it creaks. It dates back to 360BC and Plato's "Republic."
Plato held that mankind is essentially stupid and wicked. Left to their own devices, the great mass of people will surely ruin everything.
Fortunately, a few individuals are better, wiser and kinder than their fellow men. As such, they have a right, nay, a duty, to ascend to power and nobly order everyone about for their own good.
Frederic Bastiat, a seminal political philospher of whom Martin Hirst is undoubtedly as profoundly ignorant as he is of any political thinker with genuine intellectual grunt, had this to say of the wannabe rulers:
"If the natural tendencies of mankind are so bad that it is not safe to permit people to be free, how is it that the tendencies of these organisers are always good? Do not the legislators and their appointed agents also belong to the human race? Or do they believe that they themselves are made of a finer clay than the rest of mankind? The organisers maintain that society, when left undirected, rushes headlong to its inevitable destruction because the instincts of the people are so perverse. The legislators claim to stop this suicidal course and to give it a saner direction. Apparently, then, the legislators and the organisers have received from Heaven an intelligence and virtue that place them beyond and above mankind; if so, let them show their titles to this superiority.
"They would be the shepherds over us, their sheep. Certainly such an arrangement presupposes that they are naturally superior to the rest of us. And certainly we are fully justified in demanding from the legislators and organisers proof of this natural superiority."
I, for one, fail to see who granted Marxist cretins like Martin Hirst the divine right to order my life, or how they can possibly justify their presumption to seek to do so.
Surely referring to you as a Neo Nazi is defamatory?
You'd think so wouldn't you Mike?
But Dr Hirst is a journalism lecturer and must know better about these things.
Can someone write to his Head of Dept?
I've read through Trevor's post and there is nothing negative in there. By comparison, he lashed out and calls Trevor a Nazi. I'm sorry, but this just isn't appropriate for a university lecturer. Can the guy not tell the difference between liberalism/libertarianism and nazism? If not, he shouldn't be teaching.
Far Left loons calling anyone who is different from them or referring to them as "neo-Nazis" and "fascists". How "progressive" is that?
Trevor,
I find your blog posts most informing, you write without malice, just exposing what these people are up to. You have this guy in a real sissy-fit, so he lashes out and tries do degrade you. Just goes to show what kind of people Marxists really are.
I have no time for most journalists, especially after reading his "rant".
It's par for the course everyone.
To fruitloops like Hirst and chums, everyone who opposes the one-party socialist state that they dream of is a 'Nazi'.
It's standard oprating procedure from them and we have seen it before in these very comments (Hi Steve!).
EXOCET
Trev! - love your blog it's given me and my mates no end of laughs. It is satire... right?
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
In his seminal work "Death of the West," Patrick
Buchanan starts off by stating that America has "undergone a cultural revolution, with a new elite now occupying the commanding heights." He observes: "What was immoral and shameful- promiscuity, abortion, euthanasia, suicide - has become progressive and praiseworthy."
In his analysis of the situation, Buchanan describes how post-WW1, apart from in Russia, the workers had failed to rally to the revolutions launched in their name. Nothing the Marxists had predicted had come to pass.
Two of Marx's disciples advanced an explanation: "they had not risen in revolution because their souls had been saturated in two thousand years of Christianity, which blinded them to their true class interests." Until Christianity was uprooted the revolution would be betrayed by the workers in whose name it was to be fought.
The first "dissenting disciple" was Hungarian Georg Lukacs who had the following solution to the problem: "I saw the revolutionary destruction of society as the one and only solution. A worldwide overturning of values cannot take place without the annihilation of the old values and the creation of new ones by the revolutionaries."
As deputy commissar for culture in the Hungarian communist regime, Lukacs put his self-described "demonic" ideas into action in what came to be known as "cultural terrorism."
Buchanan summarises:
"As part of this terrorism he instituted a radical sex education program in Hungarian schools. Children were instructed in free love, sexual intercourse, the archaic nature of middle-class family codes, the outdatedness of monogamy, and the irrelevance of religion, which deprives man of all pleasures."
The second disciple was Antonio Gramsci, an Italian communist who had seen that Bolshevism did not work, and that the regime could only compel obedience through terror.
Gramsci concluded it was their Christian souls that prevented the Russian people from embracing their Communist revolution. "The civilized world had been thoroughly saturated with Christianity for 2000 years," Gramsci wrote, "and a regime grounded in Judeo-Christian beliefs and values could not be overthrown until those roots were cut ... Marxists must first de-Christianize the West."
Rather than seize power first and impose a cultural revolution from above, Gramsci argued, Marxists in the West must first change the culture; then power would fall into their laps like ripened fruit. But to change the culture would require a "long march through the institutions" - the arts, cinema, theater, schools, colleges, seminaries, newspapers, magazines, and the new electronic medium, radio. One by one, each had to be captured and converted and politicised into an agency of revolution.
[Martin Hirst is a deliberate avatar of this unmandated and subversive social change].
Then the people could be slowly educated to understand and even welcome the revolution. Gramsci urged his fellow Marxists to form "popular fronts" with Western intellectuals who shared their contempt for Christianity and bourgeois culture and who shaped the minds of the young.
On the cover of his 1970 runaway bestseller The Greening of America, the manifesto of the counterculture, author Charles Reich parroted Gramsci perfectly: "There is a revolution coming. It will not be like revolutions of the past. It will originate with the individual and with culture, and it will change the political structure only as its final act. It will not require violence to succeed, and it cannot be successfully resisted with violence. It is now spreading with amazing rapidity, and already our laws, institutions, and social structure are changing in consequence ... This is the revolution of the new generation."
In 1923, Lukacs and members of the German Communist party set up, at Frankfurt University, an Institute for Marxism modelled on the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow which would come to be known as the Frankfurt School. The Jew Max Horkheimer became its director.
At Horkheimer's direction, the Frankfurt School began to retranslate Marxism into cultural terms. To old Marxists the enemy was capitalism; to new Marxists, the enemy was Western culture. Victory would come only after Christian beliefs had died in the soul of Western man. And that would happen only after the institutions of culture and education had been captured and conscripted by allies and agents of the revolution.
The following extract from Buchanan's book could easily be passed over by many, but it is telling:
"[I]n 1933, history rudely intruded. Adolf Hitler ascended to power in Berlin, and as the leading lights of the Frankfurt School were Jewish and Marxist, they were not a good fit for the Third Reich. The Frankfurt School packed its ideology and fled to America.
Former Marxist David Horowitz has written an essay explaining the attraction of Marxism to secular Jewish intellectuals that is well worth reading: http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/articles/THE%20RELIGIOUS%20ROOTS%20of%20Radicalism.htm
Anyway, to revert to Buchanan: "Two of the more famous [Frankfurt School] Jews were Erich Fromm and Theodor Adorno (who changed his surname from Wiesengrund). Among the new weapons of cultural conflict that the Frankfurt School was to develop was Critical Theory. One student described it as the 'essentially destructive criticism of all the main elements of Western culture, including Christianity, capitalism, authority, the family, patriarchy, hierarchy, morality, tradition, sexual restraint, loyalty, patriotism, nationalism, heredity, ethnocentrism, convention and conservatism.'
"Under Critical Theory, one repeats that Western societies are history's greatest repositories of racism, sexism, nativism, xenophobia, homophobia, anti-semitism, fascism, and Nazism. Under critical theory, the crimes of the West flow from the character of the West, as shaped by Christianity ... Critical Theory eventually induces 'cultural pessimism', a sense of alienation, of hopelessness, of despair where, even though prosperous and free, a people comes to see its society and country as oppressive, evil and unworthy of loyalty or love. The new Marxists considered cultural pessimism a necessary precondition of revolutionary change.
"They flatly asserted that individuals raised in families dominated by the father, who are flag-waving patriots and follow the old-time religion, are incipient fascists and potential Nazis. As a conservative Christian culture breeds fascism, those deeply immersed in such a culture must be closely watched for fascist tendencies ... As early as the mid-1960s, conservatives and authority figures who denounced or opposed the campus revolution were routinely branded 'fascists'. Baby boomers were unknowingly following a script that ran parallel to the party line laid down by the Moscow Central Committee in 1943:
'Members and front organizations must continually embarrass, discredit and degrade our critics. When obstructionists become too irritating, label them a fascist, or Nazi or anti-Semitic ... The association will, after enough repetition, become "fact" in the public mind.'"
Since the 1960s, branding opponents as haters or mentally sick has been the most effective weapon in the arsenal of the left.
During the 1950s, the Frankfurt School lacked a personality to popularise the ideas buried in the glutinous prose of Horkheimer and Adorno. Enter Herbert Marcuse, another Jewish Marxist.
Marcuse provided the answer to Horkheimer's question: "Who will play the role of the proletariat in the coming cultural revolution?"
Marcuse's candidates: radical youth, feminists, black militants, homosexuals, the alienated, the asocial, Third World revolutionaries, all the angry voices of the persecuted 'victims' of the West.
Past societies had been subverted by words and books, but Marcuse believed that sex and drugs were superior weapons. In Eros and Civilization, Marcuse urged a universal embrace of the Pleasure Principle. Reject the cultural order entirely, said Marcuse, and we can create a world of 'polymorphous perversity'.
For cultural Marxists, no cause ranked higher than the abolition of the family, which they despised as a dictatorship and the incubator of sexism and social injustice ... Wilhelm Reich believed the way to destroy the family was through revolutionary sexual politics and early sex education. The appearance of sex education in elementary schools in America owes a debt to Lukacs, Reich and the Frankfurt School.
In the death of the West, the Frankfurt School must be held as a prime suspect and principal accomplice. The propaganda assault on the family it advocated has contributed to the collapse of the family.
The pill and condom have become the hammer and sickle of the cultural revolution.
In a third of a century, what was denounced as the counterculture has become the dominant culture, and what was the dominant culture has become, in Gertrude Himmelfarb's [yet another Jewish Marxist] phrase, a 'dissident culture'. We see it in the mandatory requirement for 'sensitivity training' in the military, in business, and in government. Turn on the TV and observe. The values of the revolution dominate the medium. Political correctness rules. Defiance of our new orthodoxy qualifies as 'hate speech', disrespect for its dogmas as a sign of mental sickness.
Political correctness is cultural Marxism, a regime to punish dissent and to stigmatise social heresy as the Inquisition punished religious heresy.
People who today accept these ideas "cannot know that they were hatched in a Marxist nursery in Weimar Germany" or that their purpose was to "subvert our culture and overturn our civilization."
Buchanan proposes a number of elements that came together:
"First was 'the message in a bottle', as the men of the Frankfurt School called their ideas.
"Second, there arrived on campus, beginning in 1964, a huge cohort of youth who had known neither hardship nor war. The cultural revolution now had a huge, captive, and receptive audience. Spoiled and affluent, carefree, confident, liberated, and bored, these young people were ready for rebellion.
"Third, 1960s television could convey the tactics and triumphs of campus radicals and urban revolutionaries instantly to their peers.
"Through its control of the culture, the Left dictates not only the answers, but the questions asked. In short, it controls the cosmological apparatus by which most Americans comprehend the meaning of events. This cosmology is based on two great axioms: the first is that there are no absolute values in the universe, no standards of ugliness, good and evil. The second axiom is - in a Godless universe - the Left holds moral superiority as the final arbiter of man's activities.
The radical activist, Bakunin had this to say about Karl Marx:
"Mr. Marx does not believe in God, but he believes deeply in himself. His heart is filled not with love but with rancor. He has very little benevolence toward men and becomes ... furious and ... spiteful ... when anyone dares question the omniscience of the divinity whom he adores, that is to say, Mr. Marx himself."
Judging by his vitriolic response to having been "outed" (now there's a good word) methinks much the same could be said of the good Dr Hirst.
What a twat!
Choice cut and paste "anonymous".
Your lamentations re the advent of television do stamp you as a dark age fellow - ironic that you should utilise use the considerably later medium - internet - to crank up your masturbatory fantasies. How pleasured you clearly are by Buchanan !
Boil it all down you're just a right winger who gets insufferably long-winded when confronted by a more human, intelligible, and kinder-to-the world point of view.
Who knows......you may even be a zionist..... Lordy Lordy Lordy ..... when Dear God will our suffering end ?
Hey Trev, what's with the deleted comments? Did something offend you, or have you had legal advice?
Steve the Knobspank from Northland wrote:
"Boil it all down you're just a right winger who gets insufferably long-winded when confronted by a more human, intelligible, and kinder-to-the world point of view."
This would be the same "more human, intelligible, and kinder-to-the world point of view" that, according to the careful count of the Black Book of Communism was responsible (at a conservative estimate) for the deaths of more than 100 million people, who, for various reasons, didn't confirm to the social plan of the socialist planners, right?
The same "more human, intelligible, and kinder-to-the world point of view" that promised a classless society and soon led to hierarchies of power and privilege that were far from classless, and that the proles outside the "in-group" (unlike under free market capitalism) had zero, zip, nada chance of breaking into?
The same "more human, intelligible, and kinder-to-the world point of view" that has never worked anywhere it has been tried (but only because the right people have never been in charge).
Someone must have stepped on the air hose to your brain if you believe socialism (of any stripe) is the solution to anything.
Brenda Starr-no it was just a bit of Steve's mindless abuse of someone else on the thread.
The problem with Marxists is that they live in the 1950s and 60s, literally. I saw Adorno the other day spitting on some KC and Jo Jo cds at the store, and I said, "hey Theo, what's going on?" And he said, "I have to go, my cabs picking me up to take me back to the 1960s." See, that's where the danger is with these guys, man. They just don't exist in our time. But they still come here, from the 1960s, and kill people. They kill people really badly, is what I'm saying.
I saw Walter Benjamin the day after and I was like, "Yo Benjie!" And he was, like, "Do you remember the dog Benjie?" And I was like, "Hell yeah!" But I could totally see his hatred for the West man, like, in his eyes. Ok sure, he dug Mickey Mouse and shit, but that's it man. That's the only thing from the West he liked. Everything else was wack. Ok, so he liked Hollywood movies but that's about it, I swear. Man, those Frankfurt Dudes hated the west so much. They used to spit on the ground and say, F*&^(*n'West
Like, Theo Adorno. Ok, so he was into high european modernism, but dude, you could hardly call that eurocentric. Where is Europe anyway, is that in the West? But he hated jazz, and everyone knows that jazz is totally like been the dominant music of the west for centuries. Like, they have a theme song for the Magna Carta: "Kind of Blue." So, yeah, he hated the West.
So, to sum up my argument. There are no Marxists who actually live IN today. Which is probably a good thing, when you think about it. Imagine how many people would be killed if they lived in today.
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