After the short burst of comments I got in a post on intelligent design, I resolved to post less on political/ideological topics. I like the traffic provocative posts generate, but I enjoy keeping this blog vapidly shallow even more.
Today however, I really wanted to post a link to this article which really spoke to me. I think I'm going to have to read up on some cold war non-fiction in the near future, as well as learn some things about this guy Locke. What do you all think of this article in light of current events?
PS: Its snowing again.
2 comments:
where to start . . .
not only has this guy completely misrepresented Gramsci (who did most of his writing from jail under a totalitarian italian regime), his 'all-powerful Soviet Union, which through a complete subversion of american culture, art, politics and academics, has so weakened the US and classic individualist liberalism that we are now weak as kittens' is laguhable at best.
I tend to disregard any argument that gives one actor, in this case, the all powerful propaganda of the soviet union, credit and responsiblity for all ideological arguments made by his so-called leftists-marxist-leninists. Uber-conspiracy theories are simply the only way that little minds can hope to understand the complexity of the intersections between ideology and society.
We have a Gramsci reader that you should read if you are interested.
I made the mistake of emailing this same article to a number of my friends. I say that is unfortunatle because now thier comments don't get to be public.
The consensus seems to be that the author's idea that soviet maxists created western marxists through clever and subliminal propaganda is absurd at best.
Of course, that wasn't the part of his article that interested me the most anyway. What I found more fascinating was his implication that an individualist "classical liberalism" over time gave way to a more authoritarian kind of contemporary liberalism, and that the segue was a focus less on more on the equality of the people and less on the autonomy of the individual. Presumably this perceived change occurred somewhere between the 1960's and today. I may be reading to much into what the author actually said. If my observation doesn't seem to unreasonable, I have to think that if such a change occurred, it happened both to the self-styled left and right of politics. Even though derivations of the word "liberal" are bign thrown around, I can't help but think that an identical shift has occurred with conservatives too. "Classical conservatism" also used to be very concerned with autonomy and individualism. Now we have this so-called neo-conservatism which has served up such authoritarian dishes as the patriot act and the total information awareness program.
Can we ever get back to a culture of individualsm? I would I have to move to Ecuador for such a thing?
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