From the shining city on a hill to Babylon

Twice the USA came to save the liberal Western civilization during the 20th century, well, no, actually it was three times with the Cold War. The cracks, the failures, the sins were surpressed then - by the memory and impact of the Revolution and the Civil War, by puritan values, by egalitarian Northern European influences. But a very corrupt of form of capitalism prevailed all the while along with a deep seated racism, the original sin. And what we now have are the purposefully ill educated, purposefully propaganda fed, largely white, largely rural masses purposefully incited towards hatred and bitterness in order to further cut taxes and to further deregulate. Even at the cost of the Republic itself.

Judy Garland: Battle Hymn of the Republic - YouTube

On good and evil according to Tolkien

Tolkien of course was obviously narrow, even if a genius. Catholicism does not get you that far, seeing the utterly fallen, the utterly corrupt nature of the Church, and yes, all churches, all organizations, all people. But there really is quite a bit of value too there (especially in this very understanding of the easy corruptability of all humanity - just with the utterly mistaken exemption of the Church). But in this especially: the ancient Christian debate about the nature of good and evil. Now I will most of the times put those words firmly within quotation marks - when it comes to individuals, there really is no good and no evil, just various levels of randomly failing or randomly succeeding (morally and materially), without any inherent conviction, without any real being. But when it comes for systems of thought, for historical structures of thought, then yes, it's pretty clear what they want to pull down, but what it is that they actually want to build? 

What we are now having in the West are these various choruses, paid or voluntary, of hatred and narrow mindedness, of sheer baseness. Homegrown or sponsored by the Kremlin or Beijing. What is then the positive vision, what is the actual point? Is there any creation, any positivity there at all, or just sheer blind atavistic destructiveness and hatred and ignorance? What is the positive vision of those corrupt, stealing oligarchies of Russia and China? Is there anything there at all?

An old Lenin number

I have carefully managed to avoid to this venerable age Deutscher's famous Trotsky biography - or I guess I should say once famous. It certainly is very well written with a surprising generosity of spirit (not suitable to the subject area). These things seem now so scholastic, so irrelevant. But I don't think they are, not in the same sense as the old theological disputes were (and those too led to horrific bloodshed and tyranny). To be a communist in any meaningful fashion is surely to be a Marxist-Leninist, and that admittedly is pretty close to theology, a very dead thing. But Marx himself was scarcely even a Marxist, not to speak of a Marxist-Leninist. These were serious issues concerning horrible injustices.

To think about those times, of the editorial board of the Iskra in London in the early years of the 20th century with the famous split starting with mostly just (at the time obscure) personalities pettily clashing: the 2nd congress being already hopelessly divided, the 1st having had, one kids not, 8 persons meeting in Minsk, all shortly arrested - history as farce already at the first time... But from farce an unspeakable horror rose. Still, the context for the insanity of the Russian revolutionary tradition is the utter insanity of the pre-modern Russian society. The heartlessness and sadism rose from horrible, horribly stupid and horribly wasteful oppression. Such loss, such cruelty, such tragedy.