It was not cooked up by the Bolsheviks themselves, in that the Marxist underpinnings were the common currency of Western left liberal ideology itself, including most fundamentally, the American rebellion equalitarian globalist ideology.
You won't understand how this could be the case without a little history background.
One of its pillars was free trade. But, that was hardly the only pillar.
Another crucial pillar was the withering away, or extinguishment by violent revolution, of the Western European Empires themselves, and the incorporation of prior Western Imperial nation states and their national and colonial components into a so called nation stateless Modern World System. Wallerstein, in the 20th Century, used the term a lot but was criticized by everyone. His system was not globalization, but led to it, although there are those who disagree with that too. Funny, DK never mentioned him, but then, he never mentioned Braudel on the blog either.
If history is now mainly written postmodernly retrospectively, why would one want to go back and see how dead loser, or winner, figures in the past actually thought or wrote, about their times and events, either far distant or 20 years ago?
"...Over the on the web site fourthturning.com, a number of very smart and engaged people, ages ranging from teens to seventies, have been debating the present and future of American history for more than a decade. Essentially they have been trying to integrate current events into Strauss and Howe's theories--frequently through the prism of their own views. Those of us who had read those books in the 1990s when they first came out have not been surprised by the nation's descent into Crisis. Some of the longest threads on those forums have attempted to locate the beginning of the Crisis. It is becoming clear that we will only be able to answer the question of when it really began retrospectively, in twenty years or so. If we are then living in Barack Obama's vision of America we shall date the beginning from this year--but if we are living in George W. Bush's America--and I am increasingly convinced that that is quite possible--then we shall go back to dating it from 9/11, or possibly from the events of the fall of 2000 and the second theft of a presidential election in American history. The two Bush Administrations consolidated, and accelerated, critical trends in American government that had begun under Reagan (and which the Clinton years had done either little or nothing to reverse). President Obama, I am convinced, wants to reverse those trends--but his attempts to do so are showing what an enormous task that is going to be, and certainly raise real doubts as to whether he can be successful..." DK
The judgment and verdict of history is very very long sometimes. Not short.
Take the example of the Jews in Palestine, their civilization destroyed by the Romans because of their stubbornness, and scattered to the world, and they come back to take Jerusalem and Israel 19 centuries later.
Take another, they are now claiming, seriously, that Rome never really fell but was gently transformed into the Dark Ages.
Friday, January 10, 2020
If history is now mainly written postmodernly retrospectively, why would one want to go back and see how dead loser, or winner, figures in the past actually thought or wrote, about their times and events, either far distant or 20 years ago?
"...Over the on the web site fourthturning.com, a number of very smart and engaged people, ages ranging from teens to seventies, have been debating the present and future of American history for more than a decade. Essentially they have been trying to integrate current events into Strauss and Howe's theories--frequently through the prism of their own views. Those of us who had read those books in the 1990s when they first came out have not been surprised by the nation's descent into Crisis. Some of the longest threads on those forums have attempted to locate the beginning of the Crisis. It is becoming clear that we will only be able to answer the question of when it really began retrospectively, in twenty years or so. If we are then living in Barack Obama's vision of America we shall date the beginning from this year--but if we are living in George W. Bush's America--and I am increasingly convinced that that is quite possible--then we shall go back to dating it from 9/11, or possibly from the events of the fall of 2000 and the second theft of a presidential election in American history. The two Bush Administrations consolidated, and accelerated, critical trends in American government that had begun under Reagan (and which the Clinton years had done either little or nothing to reverse). President Obama, I am convinced, wants to reverse those trends--but his attempts to do so are showing what an enormous task that is going to be, and certainly raise real doubts as to whether he can be successful..." DK
The judgment and verdict of history is very very long sometimes. Not short.
Take the example of the Jews in Palestine, their civilization destroyed by the Romans because of their stubbornness, and scattered to the world, and they come back to take Jerusalem and Israel 19 centuries later.
Take another, they are now claiming, seriously, that Rome never really fell but was gently transformed into the Dark Ages.
Friday, January 10, 2020
BRYAN WARD-PERKINS THE FALL OF ROME THE DANGER OF SPECIALIZATION
They are also related to problems caused by the idea, a dogma here, that one can rely on the market as one's fundamental political economic and social planning mechanism.
He rebuts the current predominant Whig interpretation that Rome never fell....and this is part of his explanation, to some extent, of why.
He notes that the decline was not merely to a place in ancient Mediterranean and near eastern civilization antedating the rise of Rome, but a reversion to the level of the iron age, even before that.
I am just going to cite this passage in the context of other things I have said about specialization and its problems, and globalization and its problems, today. These are not unrelated.
They are also related to problems caused by the idea, a dogma here, that one can rely on the market as one's fundamental political economic and social planning mechanism.
I have discussed it in the context of globalization of production, consumption, and distribution, on the one hand, and of the related problem of the ramifying specialization of everything everywhere, on the other.
This is an aspect of the problem of specialization, and of what one might call the cults of change, progress, and technology.
The Danger of Specialization, p 136.
"ironically...the Roman experience had been highly damaging."
"ironically...the Roman experience had been highly damaging."
Reading Sowell, one sees that Western Civilization never got back to Roman Empire conditions until almost the 20th Century. Conquests and Cultures, p. 336, etc. Index. Neither Sowell nor Ward-Perkins are in postmodern La La land.
You really have to pinch yourself purple and give yourself tazers to think of the Dark Ages that followed Rome as progress.
You really have to pinch yourself purple and give yourself tazers to think of the Dark Ages that followed Rome as progress.
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