When I was an undergraduate studying Philosophy in the early 80s, there was a very vociferous minority of squabbling leftists, who divided much along the lines you describe - the 'Trots' and the 'Tankies'. They were characterized by an endless shifting kaleidoscope of allegiances and enmities, but what stood out most of all was a complete absence of any sense of humour. This was for me, and in subsequent life, a warning sign. When a political, or any other, view becomes so important that humour is absent, it is unlikely to be a good take on the human condition, and is therefore best avoided.
I was on the council of a large teacher's union, and came across both Trots and Marxists. The Trots were disruptive (to say the least), but the Marxists often had very well thought out positions that they articulated well. I simply listened and adapted their ideas to a more palatable form.
My father joined the communist party back when the world polarised just before WW2. Those old communist were not so dogmatic. What they did have was huge compassion for other people. In those days being a communist meant getting an education in history, sociology, and economics. Ironically, because they understood these disciplines so well, most flourished financially. Independent thought was encouraged, because it meant you were prepared to kick against the pricks.
In our current times, where a controlled MSM pushes the US Narrative, and opinions pass as News, many people ignore facts, and have what Col Douglas McGregor calls "a cocktail party understanding" of current affairs. Their opinions are gleaned from conversations and MSM headlines, rather than research.
I have just seen Prof Geoffrey Sach's address to the EU yesterday. He is strongly urging the EU to STOP being a vassal to the US, and to think independently, to develop an independent foreign policy. He also believes that all nations should train professional diplomats, like Lavrov, who can go to other nations and negotiate around differences, as an alternative to warring.
My great Uncle was a communist in the sense you describe. He fought for the International Brigade against Franco in Spain. They called him Jack Russia. I watched Sach's address - brilliant.
He emphatically stated that Europeans no longer sovereign countries. Their future depends on working with Russia and the Russia hatred should have been terminated years ago. He also had strong statements about the Zionist US foreign policy and one person commented that he is risking his life by saying these things about Israel.
I have nothing to add on a complex philosophical level having struggled with my Jurisprudence exams but what I would add on a biographical level is that i have always had a strong intuitive grasp of what is right and what is wrong. An inherent grasp of natural law so to speak. I have always been drawn to the concept of low and high sinergy societies. Scotland i believe is high sinergy but the larger countries are low. Basically, this means that we look after one another. I have always been a Nationalist but never an ethnic Nationalist. I think the phrase used in Scotland is the desire to ensure the society functions to ensure the Commonweal.
When I was doing my PhD, I had a room next to a Pakistani woman who was also doing a PhD. We became friendly over the years and I was lucky to get real curries at her house with her family. Her description of where she lived in Pakistan sounded like high sinergy to me. When I was working as a philosophical counsellor I attempted to help a woman from Brazil who couldn't understand why people didn't look after each other as they did at home. Hers' was a tragic tale. I thought that the only thing that would help her was to go back to Brazil.
I grew up in what was considered a leftist family in Long Beach California. My father was one of the founding members of American Federation of Teachers, a labor union. Our house was politic discussion 24 x 7 with local activists.
I went to graduate school at UC Berkeley in 1965 one year after the Sproul hall sit-in and my 2 years were full of actions to stop the Vietnam war. This was the first time I encountered the range of trots, Maoists, etc. and probably many in the ranks were FBI agents. The students acted, and the administration over reacted, and this happened again and again. We were mad at UC head Kerr but later it was shown that FBE Director J. Edgar Hoover was responsible for the arrests at Sproul hall and Clark Kerr had done the best he could to hold them off. I studied math and attended a couple of philosophy courses by Paul Feyerabendian.
A turning point in my life was a trip to Chico CA visiting an English prof. I was 22 years old. He said that I was asking philosophical questions but had no background. He recommended 4 books. Whitehead: Adventures in Ideas. Dewey Art and Experience. Ernst Cassirer' An Essay on Man and a summary of Jung's psychology. That began a path that led to reading most of Cassirer's Philosophy of Symbolic Forms work (A Neo Kantian).
Along the way I got a degree in Math, a job teaching computer science at Bucknell University and joined AT&T Bell Labs. By this time I was interested in software engineering in which groups design, build and maintain systems. I got our group to hire a consultant and we implemented his method which was Design by Documentation. It consists of a set of documents which embed the toughest questions and guide the project. We wrote a paper and gave me the job of transferring the methods in Bell Labs. Over 30 projects, from small ones to large ones used the methods. I was offered a job at the National Bureau of Standards in DC to be a manager of software engineering. My clients were MS and PhD's and I thought that I could interview them to find out the secret to good work. The stories were different so I realized that the most important things were what the people did, not the method - it was an excellent method. Years later I have realized that I had a reductionist view, maybe a mechanists view, that didn't realize that design is an entangled process and cannot be totally explained. The last 20 years my main study has been the French polymath Bruno Latour.
After Berkeley I had a three month full field FBI investigation before being selected for the Peace Corps. Failure in language washed me out along with my politics. At the time Chile was the largest Peace Core presence in the world attempting because they were trying to stop the election of the leftists. Allende was later assassinated.
In America, the far left politically has been dominated by the elite Democrat left-wing liberal elites who sent the poor and middle class to Vietnam to die. It's been like that for 60 years. And we haven't won any of the wars since World War II. Korea at best was a draw. The rest of them we decisive defeats. There is great hope now in America, now that the left has been magnificently shown the door. The left has no one as a possible candidate for 2028. It looks like eight more years for either VP J.D. Vance or Secretary of State Mario Rubio. That would mean 12 years of MAGA. The Supreme Court would be filled with Republican nominees. Trump's win effectively destroyed the leftist far-left Democrats for at least a generation. You need to only look at Europe for proof. Europe has been destroyed by Marxist thought.
Years ago Gore Vidal said that "America has one party with two right wings". The DNC is stacked with NeoLibs. They aren't a liberals bootlace.
Language has been so purloined that to call someone a "commie" or "socialist" is a form of abuse. 99% of Americans can't distinguish between these two terms.
For decades American universities have refused to employ true leftists, so there has been lopsided thinking in the seats of learning. The nation is out of kilter.
By all the gods, you actually think the leadership of the Democratic party is "leftist"??? In any civilized country they'd be considered Center-Right at best. The single thing that Democrats hate worse than Republicans are actual Leftists, they will leave no stone unturned to ensure that no actual progressive policies can ever be honestly debated either in the government or in the press.
I'm talking about what we call the far-left liberals of the Democratic party here in America. They promote "Drag Queen" shows for kindergartners and cutting off the penis of 3rd graders who think they are women. In Portland WA, parents had the children legally taken away because they refused to allow their dick to be cut off. They want to let Messi put on a dress and play soccer with little girls. I don't know where you are, but we call them elitist, far-left Liberals. We had that for four years with Biden. It's over now.
Here's a poser for you. When I did my Scottish history degree i noticed certain trends in the lecturers. I noticed when they marked essays that my conclusions could draw higher marks if they confirmed their own ideological standing. I am intrigued whether as a lecturer you would gravitate towards opinions which reinforced yours or whether you were always able to be objective and whether some conclusions which differed from your own brought about introspection and a rethink.
I discovered your substack page after reading some of your thoughtful commentary on Simplicious' page. I've been hooked ever since.
Of course I don't always necessarily agree with your POV. What two people ever agree on everything?
It's your misuse of the word, 'nazi" to describe the National Socialists in this essay that bothers me most.
The word, "nazi" was a Bavarian pejorative that meant "hayseed", "country bumpkin" "hick"... You get the idea... Whenever I see it I know the author has stopped thinking and is simply regurgitating what they have been coerced into believing by the usual collection of serial liars assigned the job of hiding the truth from us.
The word was appropriated by a jewish communist newspaper columnist, Konrad Heiden, as his method of insulting the National Socialists in the late 1920's when the party started to make waves in Germany under the leadership of Adolf Hitler. Of course the Juden Press picked up on the inside joke and internationalized the insult.
What's wrong with calling them "National Socialists"? It's what they called themselves...
I haven't stopped thinking because I've used the term Nazi. I've studied the National Socialists in depth and Nazi is a convenient shorthand. Nowt wrong with that. Thanks for the info on the meaning of the term. I've never commented on Simplicius's blog by the way - you are getting me mixed up with someone else. Cheers.
I had a discussion with my partner last year about whether the Nazi term was a slur or not. The Bavarian take is on the male name Ignatius as the origins but i agreed with her its an abbreviation of the German for National Socialist.
One of the unsavory aspects of German society like most European countries in the 1930s was the lack of social mobility. The officer corps by and large was made up of aristocrats. The German army being know exception. How did the Nazis circumvent that? They created a parallel meritocratic army officered not by aristocrats but middle class and working class officers ie the SS.
As a History of Ideas grad, I did my dissertation on Nietzsche's theory of language and for the politics element, Russian Anarchist thought ie Kropotin and Bakunin. So totally resonate with the communitarian anarchist sentiment!
My Masters focused on The Birth of Tragedy when Nietzsche was under the influence of Schopenhauer. I also studied the Russian anarchists and still have a copy of Mutual Aid somewhere. I did the History of Ideas.
When I was an undergraduate studying Philosophy in the early 80s, there was a very vociferous minority of squabbling leftists, who divided much along the lines you describe - the 'Trots' and the 'Tankies'. They were characterized by an endless shifting kaleidoscope of allegiances and enmities, but what stood out most of all was a complete absence of any sense of humour. This was for me, and in subsequent life, a warning sign. When a political, or any other, view becomes so important that humour is absent, it is unlikely to be a good take on the human condition, and is therefore best avoided.
I noticed the absence of a sense of humour amongst the Trots and other lefties at Uni and since.
I was on the council of a large teacher's union, and came across both Trots and Marxists. The Trots were disruptive (to say the least), but the Marxists often had very well thought out positions that they articulated well. I simply listened and adapted their ideas to a more palatable form.
My father joined the communist party back when the world polarised just before WW2. Those old communist were not so dogmatic. What they did have was huge compassion for other people. In those days being a communist meant getting an education in history, sociology, and economics. Ironically, because they understood these disciplines so well, most flourished financially. Independent thought was encouraged, because it meant you were prepared to kick against the pricks.
In our current times, where a controlled MSM pushes the US Narrative, and opinions pass as News, many people ignore facts, and have what Col Douglas McGregor calls "a cocktail party understanding" of current affairs. Their opinions are gleaned from conversations and MSM headlines, rather than research.
I have just seen Prof Geoffrey Sach's address to the EU yesterday. He is strongly urging the EU to STOP being a vassal to the US, and to think independently, to develop an independent foreign policy. He also believes that all nations should train professional diplomats, like Lavrov, who can go to other nations and negotiate around differences, as an alternative to warring.
My great Uncle was a communist in the sense you describe. He fought for the International Brigade against Franco in Spain. They called him Jack Russia. I watched Sach's address - brilliant.
He emphatically stated that Europeans no longer sovereign countries. Their future depends on working with Russia and the Russia hatred should have been terminated years ago. He also had strong statements about the Zionist US foreign policy and one person commented that he is risking his life by saying these things about Israel.
I have nothing to add on a complex philosophical level having struggled with my Jurisprudence exams but what I would add on a biographical level is that i have always had a strong intuitive grasp of what is right and what is wrong. An inherent grasp of natural law so to speak. I have always been drawn to the concept of low and high sinergy societies. Scotland i believe is high sinergy but the larger countries are low. Basically, this means that we look after one another. I have always been a Nationalist but never an ethnic Nationalist. I think the phrase used in Scotland is the desire to ensure the society functions to ensure the Commonweal.
When I was doing my PhD, I had a room next to a Pakistani woman who was also doing a PhD. We became friendly over the years and I was lucky to get real curries at her house with her family. Her description of where she lived in Pakistan sounded like high sinergy to me. When I was working as a philosophical counsellor I attempted to help a woman from Brazil who couldn't understand why people didn't look after each other as they did at home. Hers' was a tragic tale. I thought that the only thing that would help her was to go back to Brazil.
I grew up in what was considered a leftist family in Long Beach California. My father was one of the founding members of American Federation of Teachers, a labor union. Our house was politic discussion 24 x 7 with local activists.
I went to graduate school at UC Berkeley in 1965 one year after the Sproul hall sit-in and my 2 years were full of actions to stop the Vietnam war. This was the first time I encountered the range of trots, Maoists, etc. and probably many in the ranks were FBI agents. The students acted, and the administration over reacted, and this happened again and again. We were mad at UC head Kerr but later it was shown that FBE Director J. Edgar Hoover was responsible for the arrests at Sproul hall and Clark Kerr had done the best he could to hold them off. I studied math and attended a couple of philosophy courses by Paul Feyerabendian.
A turning point in my life was a trip to Chico CA visiting an English prof. I was 22 years old. He said that I was asking philosophical questions but had no background. He recommended 4 books. Whitehead: Adventures in Ideas. Dewey Art and Experience. Ernst Cassirer' An Essay on Man and a summary of Jung's psychology. That began a path that led to reading most of Cassirer's Philosophy of Symbolic Forms work (A Neo Kantian).
Along the way I got a degree in Math, a job teaching computer science at Bucknell University and joined AT&T Bell Labs. By this time I was interested in software engineering in which groups design, build and maintain systems. I got our group to hire a consultant and we implemented his method which was Design by Documentation. It consists of a set of documents which embed the toughest questions and guide the project. We wrote a paper and gave me the job of transferring the methods in Bell Labs. Over 30 projects, from small ones to large ones used the methods. I was offered a job at the National Bureau of Standards in DC to be a manager of software engineering. My clients were MS and PhD's and I thought that I could interview them to find out the secret to good work. The stories were different so I realized that the most important things were what the people did, not the method - it was an excellent method. Years later I have realized that I had a reductionist view, maybe a mechanists view, that didn't realize that design is an entangled process and cannot be totally explained. The last 20 years my main study has been the French polymath Bruno Latour.
After Berkeley I had a three month full field FBI investigation before being selected for the Peace Corps. Failure in language washed me out along with my politics. At the time Chile was the largest Peace Core presence in the world attempting because they were trying to stop the election of the leftists. Allende was later assassinated.
Thanks for that Don - sounds interesting.
In America, the far left politically has been dominated by the elite Democrat left-wing liberal elites who sent the poor and middle class to Vietnam to die. It's been like that for 60 years. And we haven't won any of the wars since World War II. Korea at best was a draw. The rest of them we decisive defeats. There is great hope now in America, now that the left has been magnificently shown the door. The left has no one as a possible candidate for 2028. It looks like eight more years for either VP J.D. Vance or Secretary of State Mario Rubio. That would mean 12 years of MAGA. The Supreme Court would be filled with Republican nominees. Trump's win effectively destroyed the leftist far-left Democrats for at least a generation. You need to only look at Europe for proof. Europe has been destroyed by Marxist thought.
Years ago Gore Vidal said that "America has one party with two right wings". The DNC is stacked with NeoLibs. They aren't a liberals bootlace.
Language has been so purloined that to call someone a "commie" or "socialist" is a form of abuse. 99% of Americans can't distinguish between these two terms.
For decades American universities have refused to employ true leftists, so there has been lopsided thinking in the seats of learning. The nation is out of kilter.
By all the gods, you actually think the leadership of the Democratic party is "leftist"??? In any civilized country they'd be considered Center-Right at best. The single thing that Democrats hate worse than Republicans are actual Leftists, they will leave no stone unturned to ensure that no actual progressive policies can ever be honestly debated either in the government or in the press.
I'm talking about what we call the far-left liberals of the Democratic party here in America. They promote "Drag Queen" shows for kindergartners and cutting off the penis of 3rd graders who think they are women. In Portland WA, parents had the children legally taken away because they refused to allow their dick to be cut off. They want to let Messi put on a dress and play soccer with little girls. I don't know where you are, but we call them elitist, far-left Liberals. We had that for four years with Biden. It's over now.
By the way, I'd love to know what countries you think are considered a "civilized country?"
I can't wait to hear your answer to that query!
Here's a poser for you. When I did my Scottish history degree i noticed certain trends in the lecturers. I noticed when they marked essays that my conclusions could draw higher marks if they confirmed their own ideological standing. I am intrigued whether as a lecturer you would gravitate towards opinions which reinforced yours or whether you were always able to be objective and whether some conclusions which differed from your own brought about introspection and a rethink.
I'd like to say that I was always objective as a lecturer back then but I wasn't. I'd make a much better lecturer now.
I discovered your substack page after reading some of your thoughtful commentary on Simplicious' page. I've been hooked ever since.
Of course I don't always necessarily agree with your POV. What two people ever agree on everything?
It's your misuse of the word, 'nazi" to describe the National Socialists in this essay that bothers me most.
The word, "nazi" was a Bavarian pejorative that meant "hayseed", "country bumpkin" "hick"... You get the idea... Whenever I see it I know the author has stopped thinking and is simply regurgitating what they have been coerced into believing by the usual collection of serial liars assigned the job of hiding the truth from us.
The word was appropriated by a jewish communist newspaper columnist, Konrad Heiden, as his method of insulting the National Socialists in the late 1920's when the party started to make waves in Germany under the leadership of Adolf Hitler. Of course the Juden Press picked up on the inside joke and internationalized the insult.
What's wrong with calling them "National Socialists"? It's what they called themselves...
I haven't stopped thinking because I've used the term Nazi. I've studied the National Socialists in depth and Nazi is a convenient shorthand. Nowt wrong with that. Thanks for the info on the meaning of the term. I've never commented on Simplicius's blog by the way - you are getting me mixed up with someone else. Cheers.
Apologies are in order. It isn't Simplicious' site where I read your contributions - it is the Moon of Alabama blog. I get confused.
Bottom line? You do a great job.
No worries Arthur - thanks.
I had a discussion with my partner last year about whether the Nazi term was a slur or not. The Bavarian take is on the male name Ignatius as the origins but i agreed with her its an abbreviation of the German for National Socialist.
One of the unsavory aspects of German society like most European countries in the 1930s was the lack of social mobility. The officer corps by and large was made up of aristocrats. The German army being know exception. How did the Nazis circumvent that? They created a parallel meritocratic army officered not by aristocrats but middle class and working class officers ie the SS.
As a History of Ideas grad, I did my dissertation on Nietzsche's theory of language and for the politics element, Russian Anarchist thought ie Kropotin and Bakunin. So totally resonate with the communitarian anarchist sentiment!
My Masters focused on The Birth of Tragedy when Nietzsche was under the influence of Schopenhauer. I also studied the Russian anarchists and still have a copy of Mutual Aid somewhere. I did the History of Ideas.