2021, The Normalization of Color Revolutions

by Pedro Blas González (January 2021)

 

Spring Evening, Akershus Fortress, Harald Sohlberg, 1913

 

 

Gradually concrete life is extinguished, in order that the abstract life of the whole may prolong its sorry existence, and the State remains eternally alien to its citizens because nowhere does feeling discover it. (Fourth Letter).[1] —Friedrich Schiller

 

Deconstructionism Leaves the University and Corrupts Real-World Values

The once member of the French communist Party, a radical ideologue who was described by his acquaintances during the 1960s as a “militant intellectual,” Michel Foucault’s (1926-1984) tortured Marxist philosophy exemplifies the notion that only power exists; truth is a hypocritical illusion. This is another way of saying that truth is a bourgeois invention.

        Conveniently, Foucault’s critique of power only applies to Western democracies and civilization. Foucault’s Marxism is critical of societal institutions that, he vehemently proposed, act as “prisons.” This is the sophomoric and anti-social face of postmodern philosophy.

        Regrettably, this is also the transient and hopefully soon-to-be-forgotten destructive legacy of relativism; the appeal of appearance over reality, and becoming over the permanent things. This form of theoryspeak, to use Tom Wolfe’s term, was the narrative that Foucault promoted in keeping with the nihilistic, power-seeking fictive of deconstructionism.

        The question to be asked of deconstructionism, in essence any social/political theory that substitutes truth for power, remains: how is power harnessed once the deniers of truth attain it?  This is not a rhetorical question. Instead, it is a pressing, real-world concern that affects the livelihood, security and freedom of an entire citizenry. Foucault’s duplicitous critique of truth is no more than avant-garde academic posturing disguised as smartness.

        The for-public-consumption and sardonic answer to the aforementioned question that Marxism supplies us with is that when power is consolidated by communism, power becomes obsolete, given that communism has no need for power because it disperses it to the people.

        Marxists assert that communism is democratic because it takes away power from those who would otherwise “exploit the people.” This diabolical rhetorical calisthenics is laughable, yet no less tragic.

        When we look closely at the history of communism and its many variants throughout the twentieth and two decades of the twenty first century, we begin to understand what absolute power means. When truth is denied a fundamental existential role in human life and institutions, as relativists and nihilists propose, only power remains to fill the vacuum of meaning and purpose.

        For Foucault and other deconstructionists, many who have imbued Catholicism with deconstructionism and made a living doing it, power is the central tenant of postmodernism’s blueprint for man’s future.

        Relativism long ago took off its mask in pretending to work for the people, greater good, the kingdom of God, etc. This means that the ends must truly justify the means, for power is blood-sport, the ultimate prize and game-changer for postmodernism’s cadre of ideological zealots.

        The end-game of power in the postmodern West is power for its own sake. Like a moving target, the means for attaining, retaining and exercising power are determined and justified by the self-serving ends of Marxist ideologues. Naturally, this must be packaged and continually re-packaged for public consumption as saccharine affectation that poses as genuine pathos. The sole function of society becomes the attainment and consolidation of power that serves the interests of the elites who deny the existence of truth. This is the hegemony that the postmodern global leftist establishment enjoys.

        Lamentably, man’s foreseeable future will be conditioned by the totalitarian social Darwinism of identity politics, which is enforced by the rule of force, not the will of the majority. This is the draconian affirmation of power, not its repudiation.

The Creation of Self-Less Automatons

        In a world micro-managed by self-absorbed, radicalized intellectuals who have vanquished the high-road to truth as an obstacle to political power, rationalized violence becomes normalized. How did Western culture allow itself to become highjacked from within? This is a question worth asking by near-future historians and philosophers of history.

        One answer is the annihilation of individuality, which is the seat of genuine self-identity. Once that regard for the human person is destroyed, only empty vessels who build an altar to subjectivism are permitted to flourish.  

        We must not confuse subjectivism with genuine subjectivity. For all the talk of identify politics that fuels postmodernism, it is rare to find thinkers who bring to light the significance of the eradication of the self. This is a curious development.

        The encroachment of the “all is political” mantra of Marxism into the psyche of Western culture has created an unprecedented human entity: self-less automatons who lack the capacity for self-reflection and auto rule. The essence of genuine subjectivity is the capacity to cultivate the “I” of self-identity. The latter is achieved from within, not by embracing fashionable trends or social-political engineering.

        Lacking the will or desire to fulfill the responsibility of genuine individuality, postmodern man instead welcomes collectivism like circus animals do morsels of food from their trainer.

        A fine case in point that bespeaks to our postmodern predicament is Lenin’s malignancy, which flourished in fashioning communist societies that suppress the self into submission. Communist countries before, throughout the Cold War, and after it, make it a point to keep an iron boot on the throat of their subjects. This is achieved in a variety of ways, from censorship to gulags.

        Many Western intellectuals, including Jean-Paul Sartre, who was awarded the Noble Prize in 1964, were and remain complicit. They are sold on the notion that the display of unadulterated power by totalitarians is necessary for the greater good; the creation of a better world.

        Totalitarianism in the Postmodern West has gone a step further than Lenin by eviscerating the self. This has eliminated the need for constant police-state suppression – at least for the time being. The creation of self-flagellating entities who embrace the master-slave mentality is postmodernism’s greatest social/political innovation. This automaton is a high-tech variant of the Soviet new man. To cite D.H. Lawrence in Apocalypse, “We become, alas, what we think we are.”[2]

        Traditional Marxism has kept the masses in check through the privation of goods and services, day-to-day misery, and economic dependency on mother state. The stranglehold that totalitarian censorship has over Western culture and institutions today is the result of impairing man’s capacity for self-reflection, while promoting hedonism. Totalitarianism that revolves around hedonism is a bread and circus postmodern permutation.

        The main vehicle of postmodern totalitarianism is hedonism disguised as freedom. One efficient way to achieve this is through the creation of self-absorbed, albeit hollow human beings. Self-absorbed people who believe that objective reality owes them a debt are easily conditioned to embrace appearance over reality; victimhood and contrived tantrums are etched into the fabric of postmodern nihilism.

        The totalitarian impulse first creates the illusion that life ought to be as I desire it to be, that my whims and passions should be fulfilled at all cost, then reaps the social-political benefits of subsequent discontent.

        Today, reality is whatever the elite establishment proclaims. Circa 2021, Human life has been turned into a specter of its former condition, like looking through a glass darkly; life is now phantasmagoria.

Internet and Social Media Censorship

        The events of 2020 were a combination of social science-fiction, the likes of Brave New World and 1984, and the Cold War redux, only now fought on the battleground that is high-tech and social media disinformation and censorship. High-tech is perfecting asymmetrical warfare on Western culture at an astounding rate.

        During the late 1990s the Internet was hailed as the invention that would bring democracy to the world; people in communist countries like China, North Korea and Cuba would finally be offered a glimpse into how people live in democratic nations.

        However, wishful thinking and good will neglected to take into account the pathology of envy, resentment and lust for power of the totalitarian impulse. Simply stated, criminals always one-up security measures. When at first, they don’t succeed, they quickly adjust. A new age of high-tech censorship has dawned.

        2020 unmasked how totalitarians in the West, with the aid of Communist China, have utilized the Internet to serve the ends of radical ideology. Instead of offending our sense of fair play, those who stress power over truth have found their fountain of youth and Shangri-La.

        While the vehemency of the class struggle in postindustrial societies has never convinced working people, only Marxist intellectuals, Internet and social media censorship has inspired a twenty first century brand of asymmetrical warfare that the world has never witnessed. Radical ideologues celebrate Internet and social media censorship as the gift that keeps on giving; the ultimate and most efficient tool to combat traditional values.

        Censorship by high-tech companies is a display of arrogance by establishment elites who suppress the values and morality of ordinary people, the undesirable proles. In a milieu of socially-politically conditioned people who clamor about identity politics, suppression has become a rationalized acquired taste.

Permanent Color Revolutions 101

        Welcome to the brave new world of 2021 and beyond!

        2020 gave us a renewed awareness of old words and phrases that returned to prominence. Pandemic, vaccine and mass mail-in ballots are perhaps the most poignant. Another two are treason and traitor. Fifth column also made the cut in 2020.

        In the last turbulent year several generations of people in the West were re-awakened to old words that our educational system had conveniently placed in hibernation. These include socialism, communism, and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Of these people, only the most savvy and knowledgeable of history received an unsolicited real-world education of the real aim of socialism in America.

        In America, the inherent violence of voter fraud and voter equal protection violation by Marxists and their opportunist hangers-on in the media made us think of banana republics, not as single-crop economies, but nations where the ruling elite establishment readily steals elections through sinister and efficient planning, and a well-orchestrated machinery of fraud.

        2020 was a year when science-fiction proved to be child’s play compared to the degree of psychological torture and suffering unleashed on unsuspecting people throughout the world. The culprit of this malaise was a timely and mysterious virus that originated in the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China, a lab designed to study class four pathogens (P4), aerosol-transmitted person-to-person infections, including coronaviruses.

        While science-fiction revolves around quirky characters, often outlandish situations and fanciful worlds, radicalized social-political intrigue is grounded in narrative. Controlling the narrative of public discourse is essential for controlling human reality, and by implication, human beings. In our brave new totalitarian world perception is a greater commodity than truth.

        After the coronavirus was allowed to spread from China to the rest of the world, but not to other parts of China, the West was introduced to words like horseshoe bat and pangolin, the “scaly” anteater. Both are animals that live in Asia, and tropical and subtropical parts of the world. Consuming these animals, we were told, is a bad idea because they can transmit viruses that spread like wildfire. The Marx Brothers wrote more convincing vaudeville scripts than the contrived narrative of the World Health Organization.

        Marxist social-political narrative demands that the meaning of words be changed on demand in order to control man’s perception of reality. This should not surprise anyone with a half decent education. Re-education was the bread and butter of communism. Orwell warned readers about this reality in Animal Farm and 1984, through words like Newspeak, Thoughtcrime and Sinecure.

        The French philosopher, André Glucksmann, is correct that nihilism is the ultimate form of terrorism in postmodernity. In Dostoyevsky in Manhattan, Glucksmann argues that Dostoyevsky’s assertion in Crime and Punishment and Demons that “if there is no God, everything is permitted” in effect makes everything permissible. How many generations of children in the West have grown up under the banner that God is dead?

Real-World Villains

        Readers and moviegoers chuckle at fictional villains because they appear before us for us to judge. This makes them vulnerable to our critical reflection, thus giving us the illusion of having power over them. Cinematic transparency makes them appear caricature-like.

        In real life, the citizenry has no access to the totalitarian schemes of globalist villains. They are shadowy, wispy agents of social-engineering. Whether they are elected officials, activist judges and intellectuals, high-tech moguls or billionaires, they all share several traits in common. The first is megalomania, a pathology of highly disturbed people who are inebriated by the desire to control others. The second is their ability to disguise their megalomania through alleged philanthropy.

        Megalomaniac radical ideologues and their opportunist enablers who ravished the world in 2020 with criminal violence are too many to name. Yet, many of them were exposed by intelligent people, no thanks to the mainstream media, as the psychopaths that Dostoyevsky warns us about.

        2020 will have a lingering effect on the psyche of young people. One of these is the use of coronavirus as a biological, psychological and political weapon. Another is the rigged Presidential election, not in a distant banana republic, but in America by Marxists and their gang of opportunists.

        Treason also remains an important word for people in Western democracies, otherwise the word would have already lost its meaning long ago. Treason destroys the belief-system of youths. Honest beliefs are created on trust; and dare I say, even in nihilistic postmodernity, a semblance of innocence.

        Two other words that Western youths were re-acquainted with in 2020 are courage and political coup d’état.

        People who are familiar with the modus operandi and art of the coup d’état in Latin America and elsewhere understand the splendor of their efficient violence. That can never happen in America, pundits have congratulated themselves for many decades. True. The splendor of violence will not do in America. That is too kitsch for postmodern sensibility. In its place, subterfuge and calumny have been tweaked to perfection.

        In political coup d’état 101, the postmodern American version of a putsch, a strong dose of elitism and arrogance from the left is enough to serve as righteous justification, regardless of the outcome.

        In 2021, we understand how readily Sinclair Lewis’ It Can’t Happen Here premise can be turned on its head, without firing a single shot. Unless one also understands that education that is disguised as indoctrination is always a time bomb.

        Postmodern real-world villains have traded innocence for power. Lewis’ novel can now be re-titled How did We Get Here?  

        2020 left us a bad taste in the mouth that can only be cleansed with cynicism—a timeless, jaded emotion that should be the prerogative of old age, not the flower of youth.

        Welcome to 2021 and beyond.

 

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[1] Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man. (Kettering, OH: Angelico Press, 2014), ii.

[2] D. H. Lawrence, Apocalypse. (New York: penguin Books, 1994), 71.

 

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Pedro Blas González is Professor of Philosophy at Barry University, Miami Shores, Florida. He earned his doctoral degree in Philosophy at DePaul University in 1995. Dr. González has published extensively on leading Spanish philosophers, such as Ortega y Gasset and Unamuno. His books have included Unamuno: A Lyrical Essay, Ortega’s ‘Revolt of the Masses’ and the Triumph of the New Man, Fragments: Essays in Subjectivity, Individuality and Autonomy and Human Existence as Radical Reality: Ortega’s Philosophy of Subjectivity. He also published a translation and introduction of José Ortega y Gasset’s last work to appear in English, “Medio siglo de Filosofia” (1951) in Philosophy Today Vol. 42 Issue 2 (Summer 1998).

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