Having thus distinguished the parts, let us now consider the proper construction of the Fable or Plot, as that is at once the first and most important thing in Tragedy.
Aristotle [i]
… the thing you have to understand is, reality doesn’t really care about your theory. Reality is the thing you run into when your beliefs are false.
James Lindsay [ii]
In his series, The Marxist Roots of DEI [Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion], James Lindsay says his aim is to develop a “capacity for discernment” in his listeners. You must be able to look at a document, a news story, a television episode, your kid’s homework, “and discern where you’re seeing something that is genuinely dangerous, cloaked in nice-sounding language.” Nowhere are dangerous ideas more pervasive than television entertainment.
The ancient Greeks held that a poet (or a dramatist) was, ideally, an inspired prophet. The Greeks believed there was a profound connection between dramatic poetry, truth, and divinity. It has been said that the Greeks invented drama, which is something we watch today on TV. Aristotle suggested that the purpose of drama was to arouse in the audience feelings of pity and fear, which could then be purged through catharsis. This, he explained, would make people stronger. On the other hand, what if dramas could be constructed to make people weaker? What if drama were used as a vehicle to demean the true, the good, and the beautiful?
Under today’s regime of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion we encounter what Lindsay describes as a Clown World of “false realities” and “false values.” We see small female cops physically overcoming large and muscular bad guys. We see fathers portrayed as dolts and weaklings. We see criminal activity justified and abnormal behavior normalized. Here “entertainment” is used as a medium of perverse instruction. We find the four cardinal virtues inverted: with reckless behaviors in place of courage, equity in place of justice, licentiousness in place of temperance, and violent cunning in place of prudence.
The audience is led to identify with characters who commit crimes, including murder. The formula here is in accordance with Italian communist Antonio Gramsci’s cultural warfare, where the erosion of the bourgeois order takes place at every level. In terms of television, revolutionary Marxism sets out to recreate the interior world of the audience through twisted fables. Show them that religious people are hypocrites and all authority is fraudulent. Show them the fatal flaws that make the fall of capitalism inevitable. Show the injustices of the free market – where even well-meaning capitalists are oppressors. Here, in accordance with Marxism, all people are the victims of a system based on property rights.
Marxism is a demagogic theory, invented by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. It claims to be scientific and humanitarian when, in fact, it is unscientific and anti-human. Marx and Engels, in their Communist Manifesto, famously wrote, “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles….” This thesis, however good it sounds, is untrue. Read a standard military history and check for yourself. From the Persian invasion of Greece in the fifth century BC, to the Russian invasion of Ukraine today, there have been many struggles that have nothing to do with class. Yet the Marxists promote their false theory of history, preaching class struggle to the left under socialist slogans while seeding the right with various conspiracy theories about evil rich people. To this end the Marxists have waged a Culture War on both sides of the political divide, using movies and television to indoctrinate the masses.
Look at the actors and actresses who presently engage in “virtue signaling.” Without knowing it, many entertainers are pushing a Marxist agenda. As James Lindsay explained in his series, the woke ideals of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion are Marxist. And whether we acknowledge these ideals or not, they are everywhere. Since the American working class disappointed the revolutionary vanguard by failing to overthrow capitalism in the West, the Marxists cobbled together new revolutionary underclasses (i.e., in the form of angry feminists, non-whites, illegal immigrants, homosexuals, etc.). These groups are slated to form a new ruling majority in America, according to the current Program of the Communist Party USA (which is a Marxist-Leninist party). There will always be dishonest or ignorant people who deny that wokeism is a vehicle for advancing communism; but anyone can go to the website of the Communist Party USA and see for themselves.[iii] The communists have been so successful that their program is indistinguishable from the program of America’s ruling Democratic Party.
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion serve as a façade behind which communism marches to victory. Thus, we are talking about the same totalitarian agenda found in the Soviet Union or today’s Chinese Communist Party; only it is packaged for the soft Western neurotic. Furthermore, as Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion succeed in disenfranchising white males and Christians, Vladimir Putin stands ready to offer a right-wing Bolshevist variant for an angry underclass of disrespected white people that the communists have marginalized. What is needed, of course, is a large mass of alienated people. These can always be recruited for the destructive tasks at hand.
Drama as Gratuitous Violence
According to Aristotle, “All human happiness or misery takes the form of action…. Character gives us qualities, but it is in our actions – what we do – that we are happy or the reverse.”[iv] The message of a drama is found in the action, and the action is a construct where everything is intentionally arranged by the dramatist. The characters are vehicles for delivering that message. More than any other medium, tragedy (i.e., drama) is effective at conveying a “fable.”
The fables we enjoy, and the messages they convey, have power over us. Entertainment may, indeed, strengthen our emotions as Aristotle suggested. But entertainment can also weaken us. We hear, again and again, how lamentable it is that so much gratuitous violence has been injected into our shows and movies. The thing to beware, however, is not the violence per se.
The power of fable is not found in the production of special effects that excite the brain. Terrifying violence, acrobatics, realistic gore, etc., largely inspire a morbid and passing curiosity. The gladiatorial aspects of drama should not be mistaken for art, as in Quentin Tarantino’s pictorial obscenities. The moral vacuum that exists inside a scriptwriter becomes apparent when, after several films, we find a nihilistic cliché in place of a fable. Entertainment of this kind presents a sequence of meaningless, perverse, and shocking incidents instead of a plot. The characters who appear in this sequence need not be developed because they are animals intended for slaughter. This is not drama; rather, it is dining. It is a perverse feast for the eyes that pollutes the soul. This kind of thing was showcased in Tarantino’s movie, Inglourious Basterds, where he begins his “story” with an atrocity committed during the Holocaust. This sets the stage for a sadistic massacring of a “Nazi” theater audience. This audience, at the same time, is watching and applauding a film in which their enemies are being slaughtered. In this we find an implied infinite regress, where audiences are slaughtered while watching slaughter. Contrary to Aristotle’s dictum, this does not arouse fear or pity in an audience. It only arouses nausea and disgust. Christopher Hitchens said that watching this film was like “sitting in the dark having a great pot of warm piss emptied very slowly over your head.”
One might ask what the point of such entertainment is. First and foremost, it is degrading. It dehumanizes as it unfolds. It indulges a guilty pleasure which the Nazis themselves indulged; namely, killing those you have ideologically dehumanized. Aristotle allows that good and evil should be exemplified in drama, yet how does it work when evil is seen on every side? The hideous acts Tarantino presents are not used to educate the viewer to the good; rather, he disorients by blasting the viewer’s senses with senseless violence, trivializing evil in the process. As an exemplar of latter-day decadence Tarantino is not an artist as he pretends; for he embraces untruth, ugliness, and evil. If one can say that Tarantino has achieved some level of excellence, it is excellence in portraying death and destruction.
Drama as Anti-Capitalist Fable
Taylor Sheridan, the creator behind America’s most popular TV show, Yellowstone, scoffs at those who consider his “western saga a right-leaning affair.”[v] Like much that is slyly toxic in our culture, Yellowstone is a counterfeit of Americana. In fact, it is a bill of indictment against America. And yet, the series is misunderstood by many as “the red-state Game of Thrones.” The show is about a cattle ranch in Montana – the biggest cattle ranch in America. It sounds very American, right? Yet the underlying fable is anti-American.
Yellowstone depicts red-state people – white male ranchers – as gangsters and murderers. The story can be summed up as The Supranos meets Raw Hide. It offers a negative take on cowboys, the free market and Christianity. The lead gangster in the series is the ranch owner, John Dutton (played by Kevin Costner). The scandal of Dutton’s criminality is best illustrated by the dead bodies his cowboys throw down a gulch, across the state line, in Wyoming. By embracing this equivocal hero, right-leaning folks are embracing their enemy’s characterization of themselves. They are accepting that violence and private property go together. This is doubly convenient for Marxists, as Marxism has always maintained that private property leads to war, oppression, and murder.
According to Marxism, the big proprietor and the small proprietor hold their property by force (i.e., through the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie). According to Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, the small proprietor is more dangerous because he is more numerous. Thus, Stalin killed the Kulaks (wealthy farmers) because the Kulaks were gangsters who oppressed their poorer neighbors. It was said that each Kulak aspired to a larger and larger plot of land. The danger, of course, is that they would eventually get all the land, and the other farmers would be pauperized. Here we see the danger represented by big proprietors. John Dutton, as the owner of the largest ranch in America, brands his cowboys as if they were cattle. In effect, Dutton owns them. He decides whether they live or die. In brief, he is above the law. How did he become such a god? Four generations ago, one of his ancestors stole the land from Native Americans. To keep control of this stolen land, to uphold his “property rights,” Dutton sleeps with the governor of Montana, usurps public offices and corrupts local law enforcement officials on a routine basis. He even diverts a river to bankrupt a rival. In keeping with this, John Dutton feuds with his neighbors like a medieval baron. One of his sons, with the help of ranch hands, kidnaps a businessman in broad daylight. They take him into the woods and hang him from a tree. What was his crime? Trying to develop a housing project near the ranch.
According to Marxism, the wealthy proprietor brings a train of social ills with him. These ills include war, class oppression, sexism, and racism. Quite clearly, this is a menace that needs to be put down. Yellowstone makes this argument episode by episode, season by season. But many viewers ignore Dutton’s criminal behavior. He is a hero because he clearly symbolizes America. And that, of course, is the intention of the show’s creator (Taylor Sheridan). Using Dutton as a symbol of America, Taylor is presenting America’s alleged fatal flaws (according to the Marxist catechism). In Yellowstone the moral imperative of property rights has been turned into an immoral imperative. The subtext reads, “Property is theft, and theft leads to murder.”
The creators of the show did not intend to give red-state folks someone to cheer for. By using John Dutton and his ranch as a stand-in for America, many Americans decided to root for a character who was originally cast as a bad guy. The popularity of show was so great that the villainy of John Dutton was toned down in the second season (probably because the show was making so much money). When you get such a large audience, you do not want to offend them. Consequently, the show developed its anti-American themes more furtively. The show’s creator never intended John Dutton to be anyone’s hero. In an interview with The Atlantic, Taylor Sheridan flatly stated that Yellowstone is not a “red-state show.” He said, rather, “The show’s talking about the displacement of Native Americans and the way Native American women were treated and about corporate greed and the gentrification of the West and land-grabbing. That’s a red-state show?”[vi]
Clearly, that was not the intention.
Real Ranchers, Real History
What would our rancher and farmer forefathers have said about the TV series Yellowstone? In its prequels, 1883 and 1923, we see John Dutton’s ancestors portrayed as capable, ruthless, and violent people. Is this an accurate representation of ranchers in the Old West? Adrian Nyquist, my great grandfather, was a pioneer in South Dakota. His sons grew up as cowboys. Were they gangsters? Did they steal the land from Native Americans? What is the real story?
Adrian Nyquist was born in Sweden, 18 June 1867. It was a year of famine and death. There was still snow on the ground at the summer solstice, a few days after Adrian’s birth. The problem then was not “global warming,” but global cooling. Between 1750 to 1850, the population of Sweden had doubled, and there was not enough arable land to feed everyone. With winter conditions persisting until the beginning of summer, an intelligent farmer could see that starvation was on its way. Imagine, then, that you are a mother and father with a baby. What do you do?
As it happened, there was this country called America, which then had 50 million hectares of unused arable land from which starving families might be fed. Anyone enterprising enough to go there, and work, and develop that land, was welcomed. There were a relatively small number of natives in the vicinity of this untilled land, known as Plains Indians, who raised horses and lived a nomadic existence. Although these natives initially profited from contact with Europeans, building their whole way of life around the horses and tools that Europeans sold to them, they naturally viewed the Europeans as interlopers.[vii] Of course, contact with Europeans had raised these natives out of a stone age existence which was neither desirable nor sustainable in the face of civilization’s encroachment. Trade with Europeans transformed native cultures into something they had not previously been. This much was inevitable. From the standpoint of higher history, civilization was bound to expand into regions occupied by primitive tribes. Of course, it is supposedly racist to say that these tribes were primitive. Yet this was their condition, as the arrowheads of Plains Indians were made of stone when Europeans first encountered them in the seventeenth century.[viii] This was understood and accepted by the people of the nineteenth century, including my Swedish ancestors who survived the famine of 1867-69. However arrogant or demeaning, the thought was then to “civilize” the Indians.
Marxist historiography likes to emphasize, under the heading of “Multicultural History,” that Europeans committed genocide against Native Americans. This anti-white, anti-capitalist interpretation holds that Europeans stole the Indian’s land. While there is a partial truth in such claims, it is not the whole truth. In the early days of colonization, when Indian and white communities intermingled and lived peaceably together, as happened in New England during the seventeenth century, a multicultural experiment took place. But the experiment failed, precipitating a genocidal war. Contrary to the Marxist histories of today, it was not a genocidal war aimed at the Indians; rather, the target of genocide was the white settlers. This was Metacom’s War, or the First Indian War. According to one account, a third of the white inhabitants of New England were killed, or wounded, or made homeless. This war is described, even in the politically correct Wikipedia, as “the greatest calamity in seventeenth-century New England and is considered by many to be the deadliest war in Colonial American history.”[ix] Indian war parties attacked more than half the towns in New England, destroying twelve and damaging the rest. The economies of Plymouth colony and Rhode Island were in ruins. One in ten colonists, available for military service, were killed. Fear and hatred of Indians began with this war. The dream of living in peace with native peoples was thenceforth thought to be a dangerous delusion. However rich the Indian heritage might be, however admirable their stoicism and martial honor, the integration of whites and Indians on friendly terms was problematic.
Regarding the question of continental trespass, the Marxists hold that the Europeans are guilty of stealing Native lands and committing genocide. The fault, according to Marxism, lies with whites and their system of property relations. Naturally, the Indian Wars involved massacres against Indians. But there were also occasions when Indians massacred white settlers. The masses of Europe were not going to stay put and starve when millions of untilled acres beckoned in North America. At the same time, many Native Americans welcomed the new technology and way of life that Europeans brought. The old Native American way of life was overthrown. There is, behind all this, a curious hypocrisy on the Marxist side; for why should the Marxists, of all people, blame the side that brought progress? Why blame the European interlopers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries? Even more curious, Marxists approve of interlopers coming from abroad today (i.e., illegal aliens), arguing that opposition to these interlopers is “racism.” Why, then, was it not racism in past centuries when Native Americans resented the arrival of whites from Europe?
Having survived the famine of 1867-69, my ancestors sought a more secure existence by immigrating to the United States in 1883, settling in Eastern Nebraska. Adrian Nyquist married Anna Martinson in 1891. After farming at various locations in Nebraska, Adrian and Anna acquired land in Gregory Country, South Dakota, in the Randall Valley. In 1897 Adrian bought the homestead rights and other land, which amounted to 740 acres. They lived in a sod house.[x] The family history reads, “They were Bible believing and God-fearing people. They donated a piece of land for a church building. In 1904 it was completed and still stands.”[xi]
The family history states that Adrian Nyquist was “interested in the affairs of state” and “served for over 25 years in various offices of trust, as county commissioner, state representative and state senator.” Adrian and Anna had twelve children (two dying in infancy). When they came to the Randall Valley, in early fall of 1897, they had 30 cattle, three dozen chickens, some farm implements, and provisions. They did not brand their employees with an “N,” or engage in corrupt business practices. As a state senator, nobody accused Adrian of abusing his office.
European settlers like Adrian and Anna are derided as genocidal killers by today’s social justice warriors; that is, by spoiled children who have never known hunger or want and have never done hard physical labor. We European-Americans are told that we are creatures of “white privilege.” But there was no privilege in the world of our forefathers. There was endless toil and self-sacrifice as they built America, carving it out of the wilderness. The story of Adrian and Anna Nyquist is not one that fits with Taylor Sheridan’s sordid, “progressive,” and violent fable of an America built on racism and repression, violence and gangsterism. Like most of those who came West looking for land, they were peaceful, religious, hard-working folk.
Therefore, I do not identify with the TV rancher John Dutton or his cowboy mafia. He is a Marxist caricature of an American politician-rancher. Brad Newsome of The Sydney Morning Herald has said that Yellowstone represents “Trumpism in entertainment form.” To the extent that is true, Trump himself may be a Marxist caricature (made to order). Is it possible that John Dutton and Donald Trump serve as useful Marxist foils? Are they inauthentic as American types?
Yellowstone is said to be America’s most popular TV drama. Why? “People perceive all my stuff as red-state,” admitted Taylor Sheridan, the creator of Yellowstone. “If you truly look at this show or Wind River or Sicario, these are … wildly progressive…. The people who are calling it a red-state show have probably never watched it.”[xii]
Of course, Mr. Sheridan is being disingenuous. He knows perfectly well that his Marxist subtext is too subtle for his audience. Like those who loved Archie Bunker in the TV comedy All in the Family, conservative fans of rancher John Dutton cannot see the critique that is before them. Dutton’s fictional daughter-in-law is a Native American who teaches college and berates her white students for their white privilege and racism. “I don’t know why I waste my time with you,” she says in one episode as her students look down at the ground. How can she show them that Columbus was evil, that the white man brought his corrupt ways to the Indian, that a socialist revolution is needed in this country? Here is the lament of the show’s creator, for all to see.
As a final aside, the capitalism portrayed in Yellowstone is identical with so-called Russian gangster capitalism. The reason for this is simple. Both Russian capitalism and the capitalism portrayed in Yellowstone are Marxist inventions. This is how Marxists think capitalism works. Logically, this is how they do capitalism when given the chance; and it is how they portray capitalism when given a TV platform.
Notes and Links
[i] Aristotle, trans. Ingram Bywater (Poetics), Rhetoric and Poetics of Aristotle (New York: Modern Library), p. 233.
[ii] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xbby7yFrIxM&t=219s
[iii] https://cpusa.org/party_info/party-program/
[iv] Ibid, p. 231.
[v] https://www.hollywoodintoto.com/kevin-costner-fox-nation-yellowstone-conservatives/
[vi] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/12/yellowstone-tv-series-taylor-sheridan/671897/
[vii] The historian, Francis Parkman, tells the story of one of the earliest French expeditions to reach the Sioux Indians in the seventeenth century. He describes them thus: “The Sioux warriors, active as deer, chased the Buffalo on foot with their stone-headed arrows, on the plains behind the heights that bordered the river; while the old men stood sentinels at the top, watching for the approaching enemies.” This was before they had horses and modern tools, which they initially associated with magic. The Sioux were eager for the white men who visited to return, because they dreamed of owning the kind of things white men had: steel weapons, horses, compasses, etc. See, Francis Parkman, France and England in North America, Volume I (New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1983), p. 903.
[viii] Ibid.
[ix] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Philip%27s_War
[x] As there were no trees in that region, the only thing to make a house out of was turf and grass. Prairie grass was much stronger and thicker than a moder lawn, and could be relied on to keep rainwater out.
[xi] This family history was written by Alfred and Theodore Nyquist. I found it in my father’s papers while writing his obituary.
[xii] https://www.tvinsider.com/1069583/yellowstone-red-state-show-taylor-sheridan-comments/#:~:text=In%20a%20new%20interview%20with,’m%20like%2C%20’Really%3F
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” We see small female cops physically overcoming large and muscular bad guys. We see fathers portrayed as dolts and weaklings. We see criminal activity justified and abnormal behavior normalized”
TV was headed that way 30 years ago, which is why I quit watching it back then. My 4 year old plopped down next to me while I was watching tv and asked me, “mom, why did you turn off the TV?” I said it was not appropriate for him to watch. He replied, “if it’s not appropriate for me, why is it ok for you to watch?” I could not answer that question honestly, so out it went. I have never missed it.
👍
There is a trend to portray women as badass, nowadays. Before woman became more than mere meter maids, men had to be six foot tall to be cops. Then they hired short guys with big arms. While most female police officers can’t out muscle resistive suspects, and short body builder male cops kneel on uncooperative culprits’ necks, Japanese police keep their firearms concealed, and control perps with the use of Aikido. Of course, that takes time and training, but most Japanese aren’t very tall.
Aikido Yoshinkan – Tokyo Metropolitan Police Compétition
https://youtu.be/Pe_1nRVbNRE
A defender with a hand gun needs to be 21 feet away from an assailant with a knife in order to prevail. The most effective means to subdue an assailant who uses a knife, is empty hand. Rock – Paper – Scissors.
https://youtu.be/VYl2KCdFNgo
Counter Offense as opposed to Knife Defense
Al Dacascos, Wun Hop Kune do
https://youtu.be/dNgfxVAgGE8
Agreed. I grew up without a TV, but when I finally got one, I left it off most of the time because I could find nothing worth watching. When my sons were young, I severely restricted what they could watch, even Sesame Street was too frenetic, until there was only one show left, and I kept forgetting to turn on the one show we allowed. Finally, one day we saw what looked like it would be a good educational show on PBS, but the TV didn’t turn on. When we finally traced down that the TV was unplugged behind some furnature,, apparently it had been unplugged for over 2.5 months, the show was over half over, so we didn’t bother to tun it on. I don’t miss it.
I’ve been a fan of the hit show Yellowstone, but had not thought of it on the way you have done here. Food for thought for sure.
And as far as Trump and so many conservatives’ thinking he’s going to Save America? Most of them know nothing of, or ignore, or will try to explain away the fact that he had no regard for one foundation of this country, ie, private property (Vera Coking) years ago as well as his own involvement with organized crime (Roy Cohn) as well as Epstein. It’s all tossed to the side.
His antigun stance was pretty enthusiastic when push come to shove. Trump is just mad that all the signs of cooperation he gave the statists is not panning in his favor (doh!)… might suffer from self hate at that.
Yes, that was another issue not so “conservative”. Called upon all states to adopt red flag laws and this gem…
“I like taking the guns early, like in this crazy man’s case that just took place in Florida. He had a lot of firearms. They saw everything. To go to court would have taken a long time. So you could do exactly what you’re saying, but take the guns first, go through due process second.”
I am not surprised by Yellowstone being a lib prank on Americana loving people … The Little House in the Prairie is one such series that is so progressist with all kinds of feminist language, and yet sunday churchy people I knew kept inviting me to watch it with them thinking it was wholesome. It was cringe torture for me the couple times I accepted the offer and then I left.
Thank you, Jeff, for sharing. It really contributed to your main points. And yes, it is inevitable and correctly healthy that Civilization will always eventually colonize land held by Savagery, and so sad when the process of elevation is interrupted and thus suffering extended, as with Africa (which is itself a long tale in which Marxism gangsterism again plays no small part) and which you can describe far better than I.
Roughly twenty years ago, I once travelled to Tanzania for a couple of weeks. Plain tourist programme, but very interesting. In the town of Moshi, south of Mt. Kilimanjaro, I bumped into an already elderly couple from former communist East Germany. They had quite a story to tell. Back in the seventies, when Comrade Honecker was still ruling over the “workers’ paradise” in the East of Germany and Julius Nyerere was having his little insane Marxist experiment going on in Tanzania, the two – probably in some state function – were frequently visiting Tanzania. And what was the economic situation in those years? Despite the immensely good soil in Tanzania’s coastal regions, where famously you just put something into the ground and it grows all by itself, there were NO vegetable or fruit markets anywhere! – No mangos! No papayas! No sweet potatoes! No pineapples! No coconuts! No nothing! THESE are the “blessings” of so-called socialism! Everybody ends up starving, and be it in the middle of the most prosperous agricultural surrounding! Think about it, everybody! Is this what you want? Do you really want to go there, just because some skilful Pied Piper promised you hope and change and everyone getting “his fair shot”?
It really is insane. Economic ignorance plus envy propels socialism forward — again and again.
Depressing stuff! But wasn’t Kevin Costner already heavily engaged in the Marxist propaganda game of White self-blaming in his wrongly celebrated, upside-down “western film”, Dances with Wolves, of 1990?
To tear away the mask of plausibility from all such films and television series, it is highly recommended to watch a most bizarre French (experimental) movie of 1973 titled, Themroc, with Michel Piccoli, who was a lifelong, unashamedly confessing communist, starring as the main character and with Marxist radical Claude Faraldo as screen writer and director. The film, that doesn’t contain one single articulated sentence, but instead restricts itself throughout to primitive mumbling that merely sounds like French, is a wild ride from the dull and “exploitative” everyday life of a frustrated worker all the way down to full, “self-liberating” amok and even proud cannibalism, which eventually proves contagious and spreads like wildfire throughout the city. A macabre celebration of revolutionary brutality and savagery! Poison, poison, and nothing but poison…
Another sickening, and much more famous, example of French/Italian communist propaganda cinema, also of 1973, was Marco Ferreri’s La Grande Bouffe (starring Marcello Mastroianni, Ugo Tognazzi, Philippe Noiret, again Michel Piccoli, and Andréa Ferréol). It’s the story of four well-to-do friends – Ugo, a restaurant chef; Philippe, a higher-up civil servant; Marcello, an airline pilot; and Michel, a television producer (later accidentally joined by Andrea, a woman school teacher) – who, disgusted and bored to death by their saturated lives, come together in an old mansion for the express purpose of eating themselves to death, celebrating their suicide pact by the most lavish and extravagant French cuisine! Only accidental visitor Andrea, by whose presence (along with a few ordered prostitutes) the morbid feast turns into an orgy, survives.
Excellent commentary on our pioneers and the Marxist trampling of history and “entertainment.” Thanks!
Reading this reminded me of the Fargo TV series – which I’m a big fan of. It started off brilliantly with Season 1 and continued to be entertaining right through until Season 4. Then something changed and it became so noticably woke/progressive. Interestingly, that season was filmed in 2019/2020, when the Woke Agenda accelerated. I notice now that any movies or TV Shows that have been filmed from 2019 onwards are far inferior in terms of quality and much more Marxist agenda- driven than movies or TV shows made only a couple of years prior. It just goes to show, in my opinion, how rapidly they are ramping up their program. It also surely coincides with certain ESG funding. I’m guessing any producer who wants investment nowadays has to bow down to the Woke God and guarantee that the ‘social injustices’ of America are depicted in their scenes.
How about that rainbow flag on the camera for TV show, The Chosen?
Courtesy Marxist propaganda machine (rainbow flag)?
Marxists secret agency that is responsible for pushing disinformation, pushing immorality, ie, homosexuality, LGBGT, or whatever here in the US of A…current so called POTUS has a “rainbow flag” in the background equal to the American flag? WTF? Let’s call a spade a spade. Traitors, each and every one. Where is the outrage? Where is the dissent? Where is the voices?
Silence……
Interesting. I have been an outsider for many decades now, never quite understanding the obsession with television and movies as “entertainment.” I rarely had time to waste on such things. Reading books, observing and being a part of the magnificence of nature, cooking, gardening, rescuing and caring for animals, have been my (solitary) life since I was a child. And enduring dozens of jobs for 41 years, of course. I am now the crazy lady on the block, filling the bird feeders and letting wildflowers grow in the yard.
I have watched the faces of family and friends I’ve visited — their televisions always on — their cell phones and tablets in hand — with a sadness I cannot describe. I do not in any way feel morally superior; I simply feel overwhelming sadness and how much time is wasted on nonsense, and explains much about how the world has come to be as it is today. When others ask me if I’ve seen this movie or that tv show (and of course I have not) they look at me with disbelief, even pity from their point of view. I prefer to fully experience the beauty that still remains in the world rather than drama invented by those with ulterior motives. Creativity and imagination are muscles that need exercise — “entertainment” purports to do that for us, and so the muscles of many atrophy, and they lose any ability to entertain themselves with the appreciation for life itself, and the world around us.
William Blake once wrote, “The foundation of empire is art and science. Remove them or degrade them, and the empire is no more. Empire follows art, and not Vice versa.” Our art is degraded.
It’s nice to see an American mention William Blake. The vast majority of Americans probably forget about him after learning about his poems briefly in school literature classes.
His engravings are as wonderful as his writings, I must say.
Very beautifully put! The soul is like a flower: It needs constant watering. Let it dry up and you’ll end up being a robot deprived of sense and meaning – which essentially equates to the concept of the “Soviet man”.
Love it, Deb! I travel as much as I possibly can. The beauty I’ve seen is incredible! I’ve been to all 50 states, 56 of the 63 (US) National Parks and many gorgeous places in other countries: the Swiss Alps, the Canadian Rockies and on and on. Why would I want to sit in front of a television? 🙂 I smiled reading about you filling bird feeders. I love birds! Well, except when Barn Swallows build a nest on my porch. LOL!
Jeff, how do you know WHO to trust? Is there a simple test or short list of questions one must ask himself to validate information?
There is a Russian word, Dezinformatsiya (or disinformation). The Soviets are masters of this and have used it to create false narratives and divert attention away from reality for years and years and years. It creates distrust, confusion, and even anger among the masses to which it is originally planted.
The Russians have special services, agents who are assigned to plant these types of narratives, the more sensational the better. Conspiracy theories….
The JFK assassination. 911 was an inside job, D. Trump is a Russian Agent, 2020 US election fraud…even this Rothschild bs that “it’s the Jews behind it all” are great examples.
If you follow the thread of past strategies you will figure out the present ones. It requires a lot of reading and thinking.
The worst part about the disinformation is that some people who are really good in their fields are are trustworthy, often fall for misinformation outside of their expertise. The problem is that they are often so blinded by their expertise that they think that they can pontificate on matters about which they know little.
One has to be very careful even with trusted sources.
This is very true.
Peter Schiff’s recent video, “French Style Price Controls Are Coming to America – Ep 900” discusses France already trying to enforce price controls to keep inflation at bay. Things have to be pretty bad for a nation like France to resort to what seems to me to be a universally acknowledged desperate and problem-exacerbating policy.
Liz Truss’s short term office as PM also, albeit I am not knowledgeable on UK politics, seemed to represent some sort of short-term face-saving desperate attempt to hide from economic reality. No wonder Macron is said to have “chased his ass” in China [as Trump said] and Boris Johnson is said to have been essentially sacked by the backhanded intervention of China. What happens in Europe now [one might suspect] seems to be largely dependent on Chinese decision, this having to do with economic pressure, among others.
Peter Schiff said in a recent interview with Anthony Pompliano the pattern of banking moves today mirrors those moves of the 2008 economic crisis: you have housing prices inversely correlated to interest rates, because low interest rates encourage housing speculation. The Fed raises [as it did] interest rates, the cost of buying house and maintaining reset mortgage installments increases, real estate investment decreases [including because raised interest rates means one should invest elsewhere], you have to decreased home prices to liquidate your home. It means mortgage securities have real decreased value and are overpriced [besides having the risk of default hanging over them because interest rates are much more difficult to service than usual],
and are a problem in the banks hands. This liquidity problem means banks have to offer as little a reward as possible to customers, and this kills their profits. Shiff says/or gave his audience to understand Bank of America has only one type of profitable savings account available as of right now and it pays the depositor 0,05% a year. I may have heard wrong, but I think that is what he said.
Olavo de Carvalho proposed Poetics from Aristotle is one of the primary works of Aristotle which deal directly with the subject of metaphysics. I suppose that part of what it means is that there is an underlying unity between nature and the artificial world of human cultural constructs, for both are expressions of a principle beyond change and endowed with all qualities [the divine], therefore that literary works should have a prophetic quality to them is not only a matter of opinion, but a kind of premise in man’s thought derived from the distinction between principle and principled and their respective similarity.
On the genre of “imitation”/”art” of Quentin Tarantino. His kind of art is distinct from ordinary art in the following way, I reckon: ordinary art conceals a reality in an external sign inverting the meaning of an object. For example, in Lord of the Rings the hobbits are short to represent their paradise-like primitive quality, they are in mankind’s infancy, lack of extension in them means a lack of malice or corruption. This is an inversion since every analogy implies an inversion of meaning. What Tarantino’s art does is it reveals or exposes that a certain external sign is in and of itself ficctional (for example, the hobbits’ literal shortness is not in and of itself “the point” and therefore in and of itself it doesn’t make any sense), and this means a breaking of the fourth wall, and it uses this “sincerity” as a cover to promote another kind of fiction, a fiction which inverts the right order of emotions. The emotions of scandal become more ordinary than those of tranquility, the sense of what is sinister and disturbing is taking to be associable to what is laughable and soothing and so forth. The Nazis trapped in the movie is a breaking of the fourth wall in association with that. One can easily see the pattern of the breaking of the fourth wall for precisely this reason (fictional inversion of emotions) in a movie like Deadpool.
The fictional inversion of emotion is precisely what happens when the ficctional inversion of symbols (as in the hobbit example) becomes obscure. This inversion of emotions is precisely what seemingly Paul Johnson noted during the first phases of the First World War, namely, the European Youth reportedly was excited and happy to be able to take part in the conflict, it appealed to them aesthetically. Inversion of emotion is a major sign of catastrophe.
The Persian-Greek War was in a way a class struggle. Aristotle wrote about the different sociological types prevalent in the world. Easterners were skilled in techniques and civil or urban practices, but were according to him too submissive. Far-Western Europeans/other Europeans were more commanding and brave, but were too unskilled and uncivil. Greeks had the best arrangement of qualities among the two, according to Aristotle. They lived differently, they were a different class of men [a different society with different human types] in that sense, and it arguably has the connotation of a ideological dispute with the Persians, if in a way analogous [as opposed to coincidental] with modern ideological disputes.
The bourgeoisie vs. proletariat dispute explored by Marxism is something begotten by religious indifferentism, because the latter created or emphasized in an unprecedented way (according to a suggestion from Hillaire Belloc) a distinction between private life and beliefs, and public life and professions, thus being bourgeois has had the connotation of one’s pusuing private goals to the detriment of collective goals, and the proletariat had the connotation of one’s pursuing collective goals to the detriment of private goals. In that sense Marxism is really discussing religion, Leszek Kołakowski’s few comments I read on the core fundamental worries of Marx suggest this is precisely the kind of conciliation Marx wanted to bring about. In particular, Marx ws worried about a conciliation between different historical contexts, the present and the past for example; and such correspond analogically to private and collective, for the private connotes what is modern and uncharted, the collective what is old and conventional. He wanted to bring about the conciliation of such apart realities by means that are not religious, and therefore exclude being intelligible and eloquent and direct in one’s rhetoric address.
By class Marx was not referring to the differences between Greeks and Persians. This is not what he meant by classes. By class struggle he meant the propertied classes verses their chattel — whether slaves, serfs, or paid workers.
If I am not mistaken from a Marxist viewpoint the American Civil War would be described as a conflict between two modes of production, between Northern industrialists and South agricultural slaveowners, and the two respective ruling classes would be described as a different human type. Thus the abolition of slavery would be seen as a promotion of the industrialist mode of production, in which you have wages, not forced labor.
Even though you wouldn’t have here a class struggle in the way you described, exactly, in a certain sense there would be two classes in conflict.
Similarly, a Marxist would look at the different profiles Aristotle have to the Greek and Persians and would infer in it an underlying mode of production, possibly like the one Marx called the “Asiatic mode of production” on the part of Persia, with state ownership of agricultural properties and state financed bureaucracy under a despot, while the Greeks would be described as a Syndicate of aristocrats whose individual property ownership would allow them different possibilities, like setting up a colony on a different foreign lane and acquiring an income stream from it with autonomous decision.
Of course, this economic approach to reality is misleading and profane insofar as economy in and of itself is an allusion and gate to other domains of reality, like Ethics and Philosophy, religion. It is the figurative equivalent to trying to eat paper money, instead of buying food with the money in order to eat the food.
And Karl Marx wanted the North to win the Civil War, because chattle slavery was regressive while capitalism was progressive; that is, capitalism, said Marx, was a step forward over slavery. From capitalism you can reach the next stage of socialism/communism. However convoluted Marx’s arguments about class struggle and the dialectical progression of history from primitive communism to advanced communism, nothing is proved. It is all speculative nonsense. Or as Eric Voegelin calls it, “Gnostic speculation.” Marx was “a swindler,” said Voegelin, and his arguments are rather tiresome. He is often inconsistent if not self-contradictory (as his followers have been). He uses a lot of big concepts to confuse people. The whole purpose of Marx’s philosophy was to make a revolution in which Marx would be the dictator and master of Europe (which is what Karl Marx actually aspired to, as shown by his biographer, Robert Payne).
I believe Olavo de Carvalho said (contrary to him I have not studied this issue very much) only 5% o South properties had any slaves employed in it, which means the South economy was not as significantly/largely based on slavery as many imply. This is some of the signs, as undescored by Carvalho’s suggestions, indicating that many economic history commonplaces are largely Marxist urban legend, in this case the Civil War being primarily a dispute between an industrialist movement and a slave rural economy movement.
Despite Marx not becoming the ruler of Europe, Edmund Wilson’s To the Finland Station proposes Marx assumed a really powerful political activist/militancy position in the wake of the First Communist International. He himself, oddly enough, kind of threw the organization under the bus possibly because there were too many rivals boycotting him from within that he wanted to thwart. I never really understood how realpolitik works, and Marx’s biography doesn’t make it sufficiently easy to understand from sources on Marx’s life such as Paul Johnson or Edmund Wilson. Those were unusually confusing troubled times, though, as Max Stirner’s philosophy clearly samples, so this accounts in part for how difficult it is to explain the rise of marxism.
What is your explanation of widespread homosexuality in ancient Greece? Is there any similarity between Greek slave owning classes and American upper class?
Well, widespread homosexuality suggests a lack of expansion (a comparative lack of births and long-term prosperity), a tyrannical hedonist environment, in other words a here-and-now-leaning outlook. Olavo de Carvalho purported based on his decades-old studies that the social engineering promotion of homosexuality in current society has partly to do with population control. It is a means for certain elites to attempt to remain powerful by weakening everybody else’s families, which is some of the discrete raison d’etre of the eugenics movement in the compromised family-life as socially expressed in a literary work such as Henry Miller’s. That Greece had a decadent society during Plato’s days is suggested by Plato in several ways, notably in the Republic book. Eric Voegelin wrote interesting things about that in his work Order and History volume 3 – Plato and Aristotle. The book recalls that veteran citizens had a significant morality/moral quality which stood by virtue more of one’s being used to it than of one’s sacrificing one’s whole attention to it; thus in some way people who could help and encourage others grew lukewarm and were not concerning with the needs of others. There is a kind of stand-still passiveness to epochs of decadence, apparently, luke blood ceasing to pump into the body from a center.
The explanation would be that it is greatly exaggerates. “The Metatron” YouTube channel recently discussed this in detail and demonstrated that homosexuality was not universally accepted or tolerated by the Greeks.
Sorry to hear about your father bet he was quite intelligent. I’m 5th generation on family farm 137 years. There is buffalo wallers out in our creek pasture my grandfather Joseph went to school across the river in a dugout when oak and angus had their 125 celebration a group of us used a sod cutter and built a 20×25 sod house worked with some ruskies in alaska they said Russia is a decent place to live they said Putin isn’t as bad as people think. When it comes to CulturalMarxism Hillary and Obama have Created more than enough challenges for americas future I remind people that the word “trangender” doesn’t exist and the easiest way to eliminate racism is just dont speak or write…racism. The same for the Crowd Shooters the media should ignore their names but that would be against their social engineering agenda to dumb down what’s left of logic and reasoning The sleeper threat that is being spaced off that I believe will be mankind’s downfall is AI. Its Creepy and totally unpredictable
I Corinthians1: 22 “For the Jews require a sign, and the Greeks seek after wisdom:” In one succinct statement the Apostle explains what is lacking in western civilization. Those who walk by faith do not require a sign. Do we seek what we have or are we still looking? Discernment!
The dialectic dialogue has been in use since the 3rd Chapter of Genesis. In “The Art of Dramatic Writing” by Lagos Egris, which is presented to every theater and script writing student in the dramatic studies, I found the dialectic expounded and critical theory espoused. Couple that with Joeseph Campbell Gnosticism and you have the entertainment industry awash in subversive thinking throughout all media. Unfortunately, in “Wind River” and “Hell or High Water,” both Taylor Sheridan works, you have John Law taking the law into his own hands. Jeremy Renner and Jeff Bridges, both fine actors, unfortunately play into the hands of ‘vengeance or else’ mentality, and make it look, well, Justified, the Lawless west of might as a right. I found the ‘Longmire’ series more appetizing than the grossly political rhetoric of ‘Yellowstone.’
If we really knew what was coming tomorrow, we might not want to get out of bed in the morning. But we press on, knowing that. “the excellency of knowledge is, that wisdom gives life to them that have it.” Eccl.7:12
Longmire was better, wasn’t it?
Yes. Similiar issues as Yellowstone but clearer lines drawn with a higher moral character from the Sheriff.
Yes, the good guys are good.
Not surprising since the author of the Longmire series, Craig Jonhson, with his cowboy hat and living on his ranch somewhere in Wyoming, does not fit the stereotypical look of a Marxist liberal.
Michael: you need to look at the next verse, 1 Corinthians 1:23 “But we preach Christ crucified …” It takes just as much faith to trust in the sign and wisdom (logical construct) as in the historical reality of Jesus’ death and resurrection.
The “wild west” was both not that long ago, and not that wild. Yes, there were a few bad guys but even their actions for the most part were not violent. Most people and families tried to have at least two books—the Bible, and the collected works of Shakespeare. That included even prospectors working alone on their claims in the mountains. There was a certain morality expected.
As for not that long ago, years ago I read an account of a historian driving down a road in the 1930s with an old Indian who recounted his actions at the Little Big Horn battle. Around 1970 there was an article in the local newspaper based on an interview with someone who had ridden with Billy the Kid, who still lived in the neighborhood. We went skiing on Sierra Blanca at a ski area run by the Mescalero Apaches—on our way there we stopped at a general store in the Sacramento Mountains where in the back, next to the pot bellied stove, sat an old Indian chatting with friends—I later learned he was one of Geronomo’s sons. Geronomo was born just a few miles west from where we lived at the time, and when we lived there, there were still Apaches living there.
There was a notorious bad man who lived in the next county over, who was finally sent to jail—he participated in the Teapot Dome Scandal.
I don’t watch modern shows and movies about the Wild West, as they don’t reflect the real Wild West whose remnants were still around me when I was growing up. The real Wild West was not that long ago, and not that wild.
The DEI, ESG, reparations and similar agendas are pushed by investors who operate mostly with pension funds money. The sums they operate with are huge, not comparable to any other investor, if they find an excuse for not paying pensions to mostly white male demographic born in 50s, they can gain trillions of dollars.
I would even say, it is all ponzi scheme, they know they won’t be able to pay everyone back so they are finding excuses. They know this for years. In early 2000s, they worked with assumption of unrestricted access to global markets, so rest of the world would pay American pensions by mortgages and dividends. With geopolitical setbacks and emancipation of the third world countries, nationalization of their banking sectors, this is not realistic anymore.
You need to go back and study economics.
In the 1970s I heard communists talking about something they called “pension fund capitalism.” They were very interested in it, and wanted to be in charge of it.
Whoever is in charge of it is very powerful. Do you think Larry Fink is a crypto communist?
I have no evidence on that.
This article is priceless BOTH by its analysis of the insidiousness of communist propaganda AND its narration of Mr. Nyquist’s own, deeply American, family history.
I totally agree!
FYI – there really are “John Duttons” in this country. I live in a county in Texas where the largest landowner in the county is also the County Judge and he pushes his weight around and everyone knows it. He’s a crook and a con, but instead of being ashamed of it, he proudly boasts that he is this county’s John Dutton.
There are criminals in every county, in every class, in every walk of life. But they do not represent us, our country, or its values. They are not normal people. They do not represent Amercian values. And if we accept them as normal, or heroic, then we are in trouble.
A very interesting interview from the 80’s. Curious your take?
https://youtu.be/OJBh7tOBkpk
Larry McDonald was the hand-picked successor to Robert Welch at the John Birch Society. There is a long and convoluted history there. The video in your link slyly omits an important detail. McDonald was killed by a Soviet interceptor that shot down Korean Airline Flight 007 on which he was flying. This was a famous international incident at the time. When this airliner was shot down by the Soviets, everyone missed the importance of a congressman being on the plane. If you assassinate a congressman, you end up with an investigation and you might get caught. Imagine the spiderweb that would then be uncovered. If you shoot down an airliner full of people, however, and it becomes an international incident, the fact of assassination is lost on everyone. Funny thing. I was told by someone in a position to know, that McDonald was being blackmailed by someone he came to suspect was a KGB agent. The blackmailer represented himself as an operative of the Israeli Mossad. Therefore, the blackmail was from a “friendly” country whose interests coincided with those of the United States. The notion that his blackmailer was an Israeli agent, soothed the conscience of McDonald. The blackmail was a video tape, taken through a two-way mirror, of McDonald having sex with a prostitute. Still shots from the blackmail video, in fact, were published after McDonald’s death in Hustler Magazine. Anyone who has the stomach for it, can look at the blackmail images and see that McDonald was a very foolish man. McDonald, feeling he was the victim of a KGB false flag recruitment, told a close friend that he was going to turn himself into the FBI after his Korea trip. This act would have been a sensation at the time, and would probably have compromised larger KGB operations in Washington. Given this testimony, it would be naive to imagine McDonald’s death on KAL 007 was a coincidence — that a Soviet jet interceptor just happened to commit an oopsie by shooting down McDonald’s plane.
As for the theories of the John Birch Society, we have a mishmash of truths and misinterpretations tangled together. Yet the core of the belief is a modified form of the old Jewish-Masonic conspiracy theory, with the Jewish part excised. Thus, the Birch Society theorists will say things like, “There is a higher-level conspiracy behind communism.” They have yet to produce proof positive of this. If you examine the many footnotes in their books, the proofs that would prove their case always turn out to be misunderstandings of testimony, incorrect interpretations of evidence, or outright inventions. No scholar has succeeded in plausibly reducing history to one all-encompassing, centuries long, occult or Jewish conspiracy. This is an obsession of people who have no taste for reading history or studying social science.
Regarding Carroll Quigley, the Birchers quote Quigley without explaining the larger context of Quigley’s work. Thus, while using Quigley’s words they are mischaracterizing his thesis, making it conform to their own. Quigley was mystified when people did this, because his book, “Tragedy and Hope,” is about the Anglo-imperialist aspirations of Cecil Rhodes and Alfred Milner. It treats the period 1880-1963, with an eye to an offshoot of British imperialism. The Birchers fail to make a distinction between the imperialist dreams of Rhodes and communism (imagining the same occult cabal was behind both).
It is not entirely honest to take bits and pieces from an author to support your ideas, when those bits and pieces are taken out of context. This is akin to intellectual piracy. Quigley’s words were stolen and used for a purpose Quigley did not approve, to say something he did not say. One easily becomes confused by the whole manner of argument adopted by Birchers, as we see in the discussion with McDonald et. al. What is really being alleged? What is meant by “conspiracy”? Who are the conspirators? etc. McDonald is cagey. He does not come out and say what he believes. If he did come out and say it, he would have discredited himself. How do I know this?
John McManus, who is quoted in the discussion, once explained the true underlying belief system behind Birchism. I had a friendly conversation with him thirty years ago, when he was the President of the John Birch Society, at the home of a mutual friend. He said, “Let me scandalize you. Hitler was the dupe of the Jews.” The conspiracy, he said, was led by a secret group of Jewish cabalists (black magicians). They ruled the world through the banks and the Masonic lodges. Their plan had been to set up Israel as “the foot stool of the Antichrist.”
This is not a credible view of of how the world works. This is, in fact, classic antisemitic conspiracy theory — the theory that inspired Hitler, and a theory that has long been discredited. This is why you see this ducking and weaving from McDonald in the interview. You see him dodging the question as to who the real enemy is. He admits to the word conspiracy, but he is vague regarding the conspirators. If he said they were Jews, he would have been sunk. Therefore, Birchism, at its foundation, is itself a deception; for the Society pretends to oppose antisemitism. Therefore, what we have is an esoteric and exoteric Birchism. What could be more ironic?
“Further, imperialism is an immense accumulation of money capital in a few countries, amounting, as we have seen, to 100,000-150,000 million francs in securities. Hence the extraordinary growth of a class, or rather, of a stratum of rentiers, i.e., people who live by “clipping coupons,” who take no part in any enterprise whatever, whose profession is idleness. The export of capital, one of the most essential economic bases of imperialism, still more completely isolates the rentiers from production and sets the seal of parasitism on the whole country that lives by exploiting the labour of several overseas countries and colonies.” – Lenin
The idle classes in America, people living from stock market investment, are simply too numerous, consume too much, cannot be supported when imperialism is on retreat. This demonization of old white males is a consequence. The monopolist class want to get rid of you.
Without continuous and successful capital investment, the human race will be forced back into feudalism. People who live off investment are not idle. They are actively risking their wealth by investing it. If they invest in the wrong thing, they are out on the street.
Excellent essay. Refutes Zinn for sure. You might be interested in this in case you haven’t heard about it:
https://westernrifleshooters.us/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/Screenshot-2023-06-08-at-7.26.06-AM-768×836.png
https://summitcarbonsolutions.com/project-footprint/
https://iowacapitaldispatch.com/2023/06/01/carbon-pipeline-company-loses-attempt-to-hold-farmer-in-contempt/
The abuse of eminent domain is a real problem today, especially when officials believe in crazy theories with regard to “saving the planet.” These theories were invented to empower socialists in government. That is what I believe, having looked at the evidence for years. Massive, unnecessary, and wasteful projects begin on every side; then we have the shutting down of oil refineries and the idiocy of making cars electric. This madness is going to impoverish the next generation. All of this happens when carbon dioxide levels are relatively low by the standards of Earth history. If fear they will starve us all by government decree because that is best for the planet.
Why are the Clintons, Obama and Biden socialists? I mean if we look for instance at Angela Merkel she is socialist, she experienced it in the DDR, maybe she worked for the SED and for the KGB, but she knows what socialism is and she wants its implementation in Germany (and Europe). But people like Obama, Biden or the Clintons, they never experienced it directly and let’s say they do not have the intelectual sophisitication to understand it. (i don’t think they red or are able to understand the literature, Marx, Dostoevskij, Shavaravic, Voegelin, Jung and so on). So the question is, why do they support Russia? What kind of society do they immagine? I am asking from an european point of view
People who are alienated, who hate their own society, who are narcissistic, or intellectually disoriented, or criminal, can gravitate to these ideas.
Socialists tend to join together in intellectual laziness. Then again, intellectuality is probably laziness in itself, a sort of non sociable aloofness to problems from one’s own narcissistic position. Socialism is a great attractor of vacuous speech making because the doctrine is a sad art in vacuous ideas, much like there is an actual art of small talk ie. of speaking a lot for saying nothing in particular (like soap operas, for example).
Suffice to say that many kids out there support Obamacare, socialism etc because they do not think of the denominators. They only see the benefit to themselves like glorified welfare recipients who will not look further to better their position other than knowing enough into what to vote for in order to keep that welfare paycheck. And so these kids will profess a hate of the military and any denominator aspect of socialism (the sacrifices needed for it, the bad VA care, the inability to criticize your superior, the obeying orders etc). You can tell them intil blue in the face that they should experience socialism first hand joining the militiary, and they will scoff or scream at you.
This is what the military is for, ie a true socialism for whomever wants to volunteer and sacrifice for it, but they want none of it and will dodge the draft etc.
Thank you for sharing your family history and relating factual information about the settling of the American west and the clashes between American Indian and European American cultures. The facts are far different from what is portrayed in our media and publications.
As an aside, I would urge you to explore and keep an open mind in the same way towards the plight of average Southern Americans (along with Border State dwellers and ‘Copperheads’ in the North) during the Civil War. Rather than being treasonous rebels, many became involved in that war because their state chose to peacefully secede from the union (something the New England states had threatened to do during the War of 1812, so secession was an established and understood right of each state). Most Southern soliders/militia did not own slaves, and ended up fighting because they saw their home state’s decision to peacefully secede greeted with blockade and invasion by Mr. Lincoln’s armies. Southern cities and homes were invaded, sometimes pillaged, homes and wealth of non-combatants often destroyed. The American War Between the States was a complicated and disastrous affair for those who lived through it as well as all future generations in all 50 states. The typical public school teaching of Union as glorious crusaders and Confederacy as treasonous rebels does a terrible disservice to the facts. Just one tiny example of the myths — the largest slave holder in the county where I reside was a free black man who owned more than 200 slaves, but in 2023 his descendents (if he has any living) would be paid reparations should such expenditures ever be enacted. History is a complex tapestry and ultimately I believe that the Eternal God will rightly judge each of us as well as each nation. Until that Great Day arrives, I take all history book depictions of ‘good guys’ and ‘bad guys’ with a grain of salt.
History is never simple, and as the Civil War remains controversial, the safest thing to say is that the South’s chivalry and aristocratic culture was overcome by a Yankee liberalism that definitely has proven to have a downside. Though I do not think anyone now agrees with Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens’s argument that the Founding Fathers were wrong about liberty, and that the South was properly based on white supremacy and African chattel slavery.
I never can understand people’s inability with understanding language. I think no one should be a Supreme justice unless capable of reading Plato in Greek or Aesope’s fables in Latin. The point is to understand the nuances of words and vocabulary in order to build an arsenal of cognition-argument. The enemy never has to justify his simple grotesque requests. Explaining a child why it is bad to smoke weed is much more difficult than the child’s persuasive speech.
One thing that comes to mind is the idiocy of the Nuclear Arms treaty. Reading between the lines the START treaties in the fine line are really a MODERNIZATION PROGRAM OF NUKES but one parroted in the west stupidly as a reduction treaty, which then instigate people to reduce nuke stockpiles and neglect them. Reagan, Bush, Dick Lugar and all these illiterate nincompoops on the right must have swallowed the TV lie America is bad deep down because they are just illiterate and never bothered reading the fine print of START, that it was a Modernization program (for the Soviets subsidized by us!) contradicting its ballyhood marketing and title of arms reduction, that is.
This is so disgusting. And Trump is into it, you can bet on it,
And everything is like that: open border, Bush NAFTA, trade with China etc. a double language where we get the compliant crap end of the stick against isolationism while on the fine print it means the opposite, ie. Maintaining the isolationism of everybody else as subsidized and encouraged by ourselves! Are we mad?!
The half-educated, inheriting a civilization they do not understand, will wreck it.
Like what happened with the barbarians after Rome fell.
Off-topic, but of interest: https://www.theblaze.com/news/wuhan-lab-leak-chinese-military-covid
Covid-19 Lab Leak Theory Should Not Be Ruled Out Says Former Head Of China’s CDC
https://www.forbes.com/sites/siladityaray/2023/05/30/covid-19-lab-leak-theory-should-not-be-ruled-out-says-former-head-of-chinas-cdc/?sh=7715890d5870
OH SH*T.
FOUND THIS REPORT THIS MORNING, THAT CAME OUT ON MAY 31. IF THIS TRUE OH DEAR LORD PUTIN WILL SHAKE THE WORLD WITH THIS MASSIVE HISTORIC UNPRECENDENTED MOVE:
Putin Orders ‘Full Mobilization’ of Military That Could Be on Scale of WW2 in ‘Coming Days’
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/putin-orders-full-mobilization-of-military-that-could-be-on-scale-of-ww2-in-coming-days/ar-AA1bWYyn?ocid=msedgntp&cvid=4a176fbf06d94aa2af9541614b005e6c&ei=25
“Alleged FSB source in Moscow: Full mobilization is most likely to be announced in the coming days in Russia.”
The remarks suggest that the scale might be larger than any seen before. When the Soviet Union mustered an army of 34 million to challenge Nazi Germany, an FSB authorities declared that mobilization efforts might surpass what was seen in World War II.
To be sure, the Russians have always been pre-mobilized and we kept shrugging it off as meant for “internal consumption”. Well, war is for internal consumption…. The State Department has a way with denials and gaslighting. On a microcosmos for years Christians and jews of Egypt and Israel kept translating and warning us about islamic pre-mobilizations as translated in their daily mainstream papers (repeating the fiction of the Elders of Zion) and we kept ignoring. They would warn how the muslims were sensible to jealousy and religious envy, and how they were being groomed, but we kept ignoring it or even feigning of being for it as if it was in the benefit of Coca Cola sales.
In an ironic twist, our mobilizing angry schizo drag queens might be the only lot we have left in terms of fabricating soulless aloof immune technical soldiers of world war massacres, because the rest of the conservatives or republicans are completely asleep and ignorant… It all is way over their heads, and that is why they have chosen domestic issues instead – not because it is America First noble but because like the geopolitically incompetent Martha in the bible, the harder subjects of bigger decisions they avoid by focusing on local dishes management.
That was from May 31st. The order for mass mobilization never came, most likely because Putin doesn’t believe (1) it can succeed, and (2) it won’t massively backfire by causing a revolution in Russia.
It’s one thing for your average vatnik to cheer on the deaths of Ukrainian children–as they do on their online media–it is another thing to force these degenerate masses onto the front lines with rusty soviet era weapons and uniforms.
This seems to be the problem Moscow has.
The idiot West is sleeping as the end of the world draws near:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/the-idiot-west-is-sleeping-as-the-end-of-the-world-draws-near/ar-AA1bWXQJ?ocid=msedgntp&cvid=4a176fbf06d94aa2af9541614b005e6c&ei=79
FROM UKRANIAN SOURCE IN MONTREAL QUEBEC, CANADA, WHO WAS FORMER DIPLOMAT TO CHINA IN SOVIET ERA 1980s, ON HIS INFO ABOUT THE UKRAINAN COUNTER OFFENSIVE:
It appears that after a few days of fighting Ukrainian forces have been able to advance along some parts of the front-lines, but the casualty numbers and equipment losses are staggering. Thousands killed and wounded, and hundreds of armored and other military vehicles destroyed.
But what is shocking is that even with these heavy losses, they still have not reached any of the Russian fortified lines.
An army that is advancing against fortified and prepared positions will always suffer heavy losses. But unless there is a change in strategy and/or a breakthrough, this counteroffensive will be seen by future historians as a disaster.
HIS FOLLOW UP TO THESE STATEMENTS:
Before the launch of the counteroffensive early this week the expectation in Kyiv among my friends and contacts was that once Ukraine had launched their counteroffensive, Russian forces would do what they did in Kherson and Kharkiv last year. Withdraw their forces to safer and more defensible lines. In short …. their definition of success was Russian forces giving up the territory that they control in Kherson and Zaporizhzhia, including giving up the land bridge to Crimea.
Among the Ukraine government, their public definition of success was even more ambitious. The expectation was that by summer (i.e. a month from now) Ukraine forces would be in Crimea fighting Russian forces.
After a week of heavy fighting …. these expectations have evaporated.
After one week of heavy fighting that has claimed thousands of Ukrainian soldiers and the loss of countless tanks, armored vehicles, and other military vehicles, this is what Ukraine has to show for its efforts …. Ukraine Retakes Villages in ‘First Results’ of Counterattack – Kyiv (Reuters). Capturing 3 small villages and advancing one kilometer in a few places after one week of fighting is not how I would define success.
A prediction.
If Ukraine does make sizeable gains in the coming 10 days so that they can show NATO before their Vilnius summit that they can succeed militarily against Russian forces, NATO’s military leaders will publicly applaud Ukraine’s efforts and call it a success, but privately say this was a failure (or worse).
Your prediction is accurate. I will say further that in the social grand scheme of things it could yield to a split of NATO right after it started uniting. The Poles have been thinking of sending their Army if Ukraine falters… “provoking” a Russia who has had old unreliable nukes replaced by new ones thanks to START. Not that Russia would necessarily use nukes because of that because we know they know they are over the line in Ukraine and probably would back off, but they are counting on pearl clutching western Europe to balk at Polish strange “initiative” and end up splitting NATO. There seem to be two cliques in NaTO, the one of the old members and the one off the new recent members
I would consider this disinformation from this Quebec source. Ukraine has been confirmed as having already breached the first line of defense in areas near Kherson. There are no mass videos of “hundreds of destroyed” armor. Just videos of the same tank and other vehicles that were disabled in a mine field, with the videos being released from different angles and presented as “the end of the offensive!” and “massive losses!” (just like Russian propagandists declared just before they lost Kharkiv and Kherson to begin with).
Furthermore, it doesn’t appear that Ukraine has actually committed the bulk of their forces, with UK Intelligence stating that Ukraine is still holding in reserve the vast majority of their forces, which means what we’ve seen so far has just been probing and taking advantage of weaknesses in the Russian line. UK Intelligence expects Ukraine to attack in vast numbers in a single weak point at some point in the near future.
Exactly right.
I have heard very different reports. We shall see how this looks in a few days.
DNYUZ/New York Times: As Ukraine Launches Counteroffensive, Definitions of ‘Success’ Vary:
https://dnyuz.com/2023/06/10/as-ukraine-launches-counteroffensive-definitions-of-success-vary/
RUSSIAN MEDIA HAS JUMPED ON ABOUT THIS REPORT ARTICLE:
NYT outlines what Ukrainian counteroffensive ‘success’ means in the West (RT).
https://www.rt.com/russia/577852-ukraine-counteroffensive-us-eu/
Jeff, what is your understanding of what is happening with the Ukrainian counteroffensive? Are the Ukrainians really losing thousands of soldiers and many armored vehicles? Or is that information Russian propaganda, or even maybe Ukrainian misinformation to deceive their enemies?
Also, were you able to get in touch with Calderon?
What do yo make of Calderon saying that China is definitely going through some kind of economic downturn, as their business investments in Mexico had really lessened? Do you think that is actually a sign that of China mobilizing, and shifting to wartime production in China?
I’ve noticed since the beginning of the Ukrainian counteroffensive, that the articles by Larry Johnson and company have increased, and are saying the counteroffensive is failing. The Russian vulture trolls seem to be circling the articles in greater number, with a much more gleeful disposition in their comments against Ukraine. They are in fuller force on the Breitbart articles as well.
Are these articles and comments taking this stance because Ukraine is clearly not having success, or is it all a more-ramped-up-than-usual propaganda campaign to make Conservative readers think they are failing?
A lot of images of burned Bradleys and Leopards appeared recently. Attacking straight against defense lines without artillery preparation is a suicide. Ukraine has no artillery.
Images of a platoon of vehicles burning is small potatoes. That is going to happen somewhere in even the most successful offensive. It tells us nothing.
The pro-Russian trolls have been reporting Ukrainian defeat regularly throughout the war, even as Ukraine has won at Kiev, at Kherson, at Kharkiv. Ukraine is, so far, saying very little about the fighting. As the Russian sources are notoriously unreliable, we do not know what has happened. Expect it to bloody either way. Most battles have a high attrition during offensives — for both sides. Losses on one side do not tell the whole story.
I have to say the Yellowstone went the way of so many other TV shows for me and my house today. Within the first 5 minutes of the only episode I turned on, they used the F-word twice. Any show that can’t entertain without the F-word, GD or a display of homosexuality does not come into my house anymore. My life may have been that way once, but it is not anymore and neither will the entertainment in my home be.
Degenerate capitalist art. No such trash is being created in socialist countries.
👍
Like Jeff, my own great-grandparents were also homesteaders on the South Dakota rolling grasslands around 1890. A photo shows a small wooden shack rather than the more common sod house. He a stenographer from Detroit, and she from the Norwegian Telemark. He died after one year of a respiratory ailment.
I don’t need to watch TV to become immersed in Marxist drama. I live in California.
You are immersed indeed!
Being a non-American living on the other side of the “pond”, I just watched a few clips from the Yellowstone TV series to get some idea of it. If that’s the most popular television show in “Red” America, the country has certainly long entered dangerous, dystopian territory. People are being conditioned to get ready for a new civil war – a civil war, pun intended, that won’t be civil, but infinitely barbarous…
This is exactly what I see, too.
Off-topic, but of interest: https://www.breitbart.com/latin-america/2023/06/08/cuba-cozies-russia-report-claims-island-will-host-chinese-spy-base/
It’s not called ‘programming’ for nothing….
“Ad for the 1987 miniseries “Amerika”, which tells the story of an America under Communist rule in the futuristic year 1997.”
Wonderful and very interesting…..sparked some much needed intellectual conversation this evening.
😀
Nice to hear from you.
I’m grateful that I went to a very conservative Christian college, and televisions were not allowed in the dorms, where I lived for three years. That freed me from thinking television had to be a staple in one’s life, and for years I didn’t have one. Eventually, I did get a TV with a DVD player. My wife really wanted to get a satellite package with Netflix and such, so I finally agreed several years ago. After several months, I told her to cancel it and tell them to come get the satellite dish. So, out of the past 23 years, I have only had television (other than occasional DVDs) for less than one year. I have never missed it.
I’ve never seen a Quentin Tarantino movie, or most television series.
Now, back when NCIS was running with agent Jethro Gibbs, McGee, Dinozzo, Ziva David, Abby, and Ducky, we used to go to my grandparents’ house down the road and watch it with them and my aunt every Thursday night (or Tuesday, I forget which night.) Now that was a good show for a few years, until most of the original cast departed. They got a little to pro Muslim for my taste as well.
As someone who lives in Montana, I have to say, “Wow.” Yellowstone is the most popular show on television? We haven’t had a TV for years, but my kids who live out of state or work with people online started getting asked if living here is like the show. My son in southern California sent me this:
The conversations typically go like this:
Them: You’re from Montana? Have you seen Yellowstone? Is it like the show?
Me: I’ve never seen the show, so I have no idea.
Them: Really? You should watch it. It’s amazing.
End of conversation.
He did finally see about 10 minutes of the show. In that scene, a thief drove off with a trailer of horses. The sheriff caught up to the thief on horseback and landed a lasso around his neck through his truck window. Not knowing anything else about the show, it’s just disturbing that young and not-so-young people are expectantly asking if life here is like the show. My kids were dumbfounded.
People say they know television shows are pretend, but I think many pick up a lot of their general life “knowledge” through them. My friend from Dodge City has disappointed a lot of people by letting them know that there are no shootouts there anymore and the roads are paved.
To some extent, people today live through television. I wrote about many of the problems with TV in “Origins of the Fourth World War.” We do not fully realize how it shapes our thought process.
“Plandemic 3” has been released:
“They’re now attacking our youngest. For decades, they’ve gone after people at the collegiate level, but now they’re going after K through 12.
“And when you get into the heads of little people and you convince them that all of America is racist, that white people are bad, that everyone is oppressed just by their skin color, that police are bad … ultimately it leaves people in this place of being easily controlled and subverted to what ultimately will look a lot like communism.
“If you understand the history of the way that other nations have been overcome and infiltrated by communist ideologies, and you then take a look at what’s happening here in America, you realize that this is actually what’s taking place here …
And it is taking place.
“History is never simple……” It is complicated. Jeff does a lot of heavy lifting to uncover a lot of Gems. It is not easy. I enjoyed reading some history of South Dakota and your family.
Thanks. Kevin Taylor
Just found a 20-minute interview with Kevin Costner of apparently 2019, that was about himself and the Yellowstone series and his overall career, and did a transcript of a small section of it, as it is so emblematic in terms of delusion and maybe outright intellectual dishonesty. Look at this nonsensical, wishy-washy, sentimental, almost comical word salad! It’s quite hilarious, isn’t it?
Kevin Costner: I had a really conservative background.
Peter Travers: Yeah. So you become into a whole world where that isn’t the case, where there are – in Hollywood, it’s especially liberal, you know…
Kevin Costner: Right!
Peter Travers: … when you come into it. How did you react to that?
Kevin Costner: Well, actually, I WAS REALLY GLAD to experience liberal points of view. I kind of – MY FOUNDATION IS CONSERVATIVE, BUT NOT MY VIEW OF THE WORLD. My view of the world is a, “Not everybody can pick themselves up by their boot straps.” When you have 300 million people, people fall through the cracks, and if you look over and say, “They are just not hustling. They could work. They got two legs; they got …” That’s a very small example. I have a lot more empathy, you know – it doesn’t mean conservatives don’t – but it means a different point of view. Listen, I was against all the people who were against the Vietnam War. But I was 13, and my brother was in Vietnam, and my parents at the table, when they’d look at the TV and see people protesting and spitting on the soldiers and calling them baby killers, my parents hated the quote/unquote hippies, they hated the protest marchers, only to find out 40 years ago that it was wrong for them to send my brother to Vietnam. THERE WAS NO REAL REASON FOR THAT, and …
Peter Travers: He was just there!
Kevin Costner: … and so, what I’m saying is, so, from a conservative background, I was still hearing the voices of my parents for a long time. I had to find my own voice. I wasn’t an angry teenager. I actually had empathy for my parents because they were so worried about my older brother, but I thought I didn’t really want to cause him trouble.
Questions to Coster: What voices are you hearing now?
One thing that people need to keep in mind, is that all shows teach lessons—we need to discern what lessons are being taught.
For example, I enjoyed a Hong Kong movie called “The Source of Love” where the source is Jesus and following him with several lesser lessons connected with that.
I never heard of the series called “Yellowstone” before seeing it in the message. I watched the short take out in the comments section, and the lessons I saw are: cops are corrupt in both scenes in that take out, it’s alright to destroy personal property without warning of those who thought they were on BLM (public) land, it’s OK to murder people who trespass instead of calling in the sheriff to arrest them, it’s fine to steal from a business that cooperated with corrupt police, the idea that one person shouldn’t own so much land was put in the mouth of a Chinese (commie) tourist, what lessons did I miss? What are people putting in their minds?
They are not memorizing the principles of our Founding Fathers.
out of context, but may be of interest:
https://youtu.be/BGQJLl54Bqw
Of course, the Chinese like the idea of blurring the distinction between civilian and military ships, and this will help them when zero hour approaches.
Your analysis of Yellowstone reminds me of Fight Club which is a super popular movie that guys love for it being supposedly pro-masculine and pro-toughness but actually is very subversive, anti-man, and tells guys they have to kill themselves and kill off the masculine part of their personality.
By the way, my great grandparents came to America about the same time your ancestors did from a similar part of the world! Mine were Jewish, and came from Lithuania at the end of the 19th century!
Dan: Yes, “Fight Club” also has a subversive theme. It is anti-instinctual, and puts certain male instincts in the worst possible light.