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Showing posts with the label totalitarianism

Disaster Nationalism: Participatory Disinfotainment and Desire for Totalitarianism

By Richard Seymour At the origin of modern political conspiracism lies a myth of subversive power, first fabricated in response to the French revolution. In 1797, two books appeared simultaneously. These were Abbé Barruel’s five-volume Mémoire pour servietterr à l’histoire du jacobinisme, and John Robison’s Proofs of a conspiracy against all the religions and governments of Europe, carried on in the secret meetings of Free Masons, Illuminati and Reading Societies. Both attributed the revolution to a centuries-old conspiracy of secret societies (from the Order of Templars to the Freemasons), responsible for an assault on religion and political authority. This theory of totalitarianism avanta la laettere is the template from which modern conspiracy narratives – from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion to the ‘New World Order’ – are cut. Conspiracy theory today, says Fredric Jameson, is an attempt to represent the ‘social totality’ at the level of fantasy in a way that evades ‘liberal an...

Having a Job

Going Beyond ‘Communism’

“Several decades after its exhaustion, the communist experience does not need to be defended, idealized, or demonized. It deserves to be critically understood as a whole, as a dialectical totality shaped by internal tensions and contradictions, presenting multiple dimensions in a vast spectrum of shades, from redemptive élans to totalitarian violence, from participatory democracy and collective deliberation to blind oppression and mass extermination, from the most utopian imagination to the most bureaucratic domination — sometimes shifting from one to the other in a short span of time. Like many other “isms” of our political and philosophical lexicon, communism is a polysemic and ultimately “ambiguous” word...” Coming to terms with communist history

EU

Anti-communism without communism, demonising the Left and appeasing the far-right. The End of Anti-Fascism Related European identity and the paradox of anti-communism Instructions not to use anti-capitalist materials in schools


The New Anti-Communism: Rereading the Twentieth Century

Enzo Traverso says, "the Stalinist legacy, made up of a mountain of ruins and dead, did not erase the origins of communism in the tradition of the Enlightenment and eighteenth-century rationalist humanism. 
By contrast,  "[N]ationalism and imperialism, Pan-Germanism and the idea of `living space', `redemptive' anti-Semitism and racism, eugenics and extermination of the `lower races', hatred of the left and charismatic dictatorship are tendencies that had appeared, in more or less developed forms, from the end of the nineteenth century on. Nazism did not create them, it simply radicalized them. 
If Nazism achieved a fusion of three different struggles - a colonial assault on the Slavic world, a political struggle against communism and the Soviet Union, and a racial fight against the Jews - into a unique war of conquest and extermination, this means that its model could not be Bolshevism. It would be more relevant and coherent to find its `model' in the col...
"Under the relentless thrust of accelerating over-population and increasing over-organization, and by means of ever more effective methods of mind-manipulation, the democracies will change their nature; the quaint old forms—elections, parliaments, Supreme Courts and all the rest—will remain. The underlying substance will be a new kind of non-violent totalitarianism. All the traditional names, all the hallowed slogans will remain exactly what they were in the good old days. Democracy and freedom will be the theme of every broadcast and editorial—but Democracy and freedom in a strictly Pickwickian sense. Meanwhile the ruling oligarchy and its highly trained elite of soldiers, policemen, thought-manufacturers and mind-manipulators will quietly run the show as they see fit." Aldous Huxley,  Brave New World Revisited , published 1958