Anyone wishing to understand what lay behind the brutal political repression and totalitarian industrial slavery imposed by the Bolsheviks would do well to read the work of historian Antony C.
It seems to me that between Sutton, Quigley and G. Edward Griffin, one would have many red-pilling bases covered.
Quite the photo of sayanim-extraordinaire "Lucky" Larry Silverstein ... looks like a cross between Bill Gates and Henry Kissinger!
"Lucky Larry! Every morning, without exception, Larry Silverstein took his breakfast at Windows on the World atop the north tower of the WTC. Until the morning of September 11, when he had an appointment with a dermatologist."
I would never claim that the anarchist movement is "undefilable", Helen. In fact, I've spent quite a lot of time describing exactly how it has been defiled... But it remains true that, unlike communism, it is an unsuitable ideological vehicle for authoritarian state control! It is the principles behind real anarchism which are important. These reach further and deeper than anarchism itself and could animate some new socio-political outlook drawing on the best of human wisdom.
Are we not then in the realm of insubstantial ideas and not of human reality? I'm deeply suspicious of all isms, ideals, agendas... Do we really need to hang our truths on ideologies? I believe we are in times where everything is being stripped away from what actually is. From what I know of you I can see you are doing an amazing job in stripping back the layers of confustication and it's fascinating reading all about it. Personally I have to stop at signing up for an ideology which is purported to be the one true way to righting all wrongs, though.
And as I've elsewhere recently been accused of the No True Scotsman fallacy (on the subject of Christianity), I am wondering how this works with anarchists too? Who gets to decide who is no longer an anarchist, if the person in question is still insisting that they are one? This is a genuine question! If you are not guilty of this fallacy here then maybe I wasn't either!
On the subject of Marxism and anarchism, I would love you to have a conversation with Rhyd Wildermuth, Paul, as it would really help me to see more clearly what is going on there. I highly respect both your work and am intrigued by this major difference in outlook between you.
Anarchism, although it ends with "-ism", isn't really an ideology in the way that Marxism is. It's the political manifestation of something much older, of the human awareness of our belonging to nature, and to organic life-energy, and thus of having no need for the artifice of states and authorities to tell us how to live or how to think. It's close to Taoism, in many ways, which itself is not a religion of the top-down kind, in theory or in practice. I have written quite a lot about all this, so if you really want to understand where I am coming from, I'd recommend having a look at The Anarchist Revelation
Thank you Paul. I'm new to anarchism, as you can probably tell! Thanks for the links. What you say makes sense, though there is still a niggling resistance in me to having to give a name to what is our birth right. It seems part of what can divide us - claiming the truth lies in this or that concept which a word can signify. I shall take this away and ponder.
Without disagreeing with Paul's point, I would add that any ideology is just the study of ideas - literally the science of ideas. When taken up by a large part of a society any ideology will have social, economic, political, and religious impact. Everyone without exception lives with some ideology or collection of ideologies governing their lives. If they are unaware, that does not make it less true. The more unaware the more easily manipulated though.
Conversely, if an ideology is held to rigidly, it leads to dogmatic or structural tribalism.
That leaves people evaluating each statement of thought on its merits. If we don't do that as individuals, it will be done for us and imposed. There is no escaping ideologies.
As soon as we accept the landscape, the more easily it is to navigate. True anarchism is harder to manipulate and it is harder to coordinate collectively.
Any system can be abused. Any ideology can be abused - will be. Some ideologies are clearly bad. Many are mixed. But, if you have no ideology, you abuse yourself because by default you have no way to truly evaluate.
Your last sentence is leading me to wonder about ideologies being part and parcel of how we navigate our way through (the constructs of - as many say...) space and time, our materiality. We probably aren't abusing ourselves if we don't have any ideologies on the level of non-material frequencies? But for now we appear to be very much involved in our earthly world and as you say need to be acutely aware of how we are navigating it and crucially how others are doing so and when they are trying to convince us that their way is the only one. Stuff like that.
Yes. And there are amaterial ideologies (or philosophies or even theologies). There are ideological mixes. And there are ideologies that are resolutely materialist. Some philosophies are meant to be thought exercises aimed at helping understand complex interactions in simple terms. Helpful if used properly. Horribly reductive if applied without question. However you slice it, the best ideologies (healthiest), elevate the human condition and provide a framework for resilience, purpose, and understanding. The worst are unhealthy straight jackets that promise security and prescribe understanding. The worst ideologies offer a counterfeit of healthy existence, but there is comfort in predictability even unhealthy predictability. "Stuff like that" is at the heart of what it means to be human.
Regarding the WEF before they set up the Young Global Leaders program (known as Global Leaders of Tomorrown until 2003) in 1991 visited St Petersburg, Russia (aka Leningrad) in late 1990 and while there met with 3 young Soviets. One of them was Putin and yes Klaus Schwab was one of the WEF visitors. If you were to ask me I’d suggest that this was a pivotal meeting where the WEF was taught the lessons that those who had been running Komosol had learnt about such programs.
And if I remember correctly one of Australia’s ardent zionists, Frank Lowy, owned the retail lease on the bottom floors, and like Silverstein he had taken it up not long before 9/11. It really is past time that these guys were taken to task for their potential roles in this crime (assumed innocent until proven guilty but….).
Paul, have you read G. Edward Griffin’s “The Creature from Jekyll Island”? It covers bankster funding of the Bolshevik Revolution, J.P. Morgan being a front man for the Rothschilds, the secretive hatching of the Federal Reserve, the weaponization of inflation, the progression toward world socialism, and *so* much more. I haven’t finished it yet, but it overlaps with much of what you’ve written and adds dimensions I hadn’t previously encountered.
Well, it isn't really about communism or Bolshevism then is it? We ought to be focusing on the financial oligarchy. In the US, anti-communism was (and seems to have anachronistically been given new life) the state religion. It was used to destroy the workers movement that frightened the ruling class in the 1930's. It worth noting that JFK, RFK, MLK (and many others) were accused of being "soft on communism" or being actual communists. They were assassinated not because they wanted to institute totalitarian rule, but because they challenged it. This focus on communism blinded us from seeing the real enemy that was celebrating a massive increase wealth and power post WWII and entrenched that power with new institutions like the CIA ("capitalism's secret army"). Anarchism could have been the vehicle for the power grab by the financial oligarchy. Then we would be bemoaning anarchism not communism. (I am pretty sure that Identity Politics came out of (lifestyle) anarchist circles.) But in either case, it misses the target. We should be focusing on the real enemy, not their dupes.
Anti-communism was created and exploited by the very same networks, as the article explains. No, anarchism could never have been the vehicle for a power grab by the financial oligarchy, because anarchism is intrinsically opposed to power from above. That is what we need today - philosophies of opposition that are incompatible with, and thus unhijackable by, the criminocracy. Communism - marxism - does not fall into this category. It is therefore a dead end, a waste of time, a "red herring" in terms of authentic resistance.
Paul, how is it, then, that so many anarchists have fallen for the globalist narratives of recent years - covid and gender identity in particular? An "ism" is only as undefilable as the people it attracts, isn't it?
I mean anarchists. I'm an expert in neither anarchism nor socialism, but I am aware that proponents of neither have been immune to the recent polarising narratives on viruses and gender. That many socialists have fallen for them isn't news. As I'm only now coming into contact with those who describe themselves as anarchists, I've only recently been hearing about the experiences of those who have been cast out of their communities by their fellows who have religiously swallowed these narratives.
Do you mean the "lower" the class the more immune to ideology? I think that may be broadly true, if not across the board. I was listening the After Skool with Govinder on that very subject this week
Ok, I will give you that. (Although had the cash spigot been opened to the anarchists, who knows how their ideas would change.) Anarchism can provide resistance, but it can't lead a revolution. It is easy for a centralized power with state of the art weapons and unlimited financial resources to pick off decentralized bands of resistance. Anarchism will be great once entrenched power is overthrown. But it cannot overthrow it. How are you going to make decisions or coordinate disparate anarchist groups? Thru consensus? That's what killed OWS. They couldn't make decisions, even crucial ones like how to defend themselves when the cops would inevitably come.
1. Anarchists who change their idea for financial gain have ceased to be anarchists.
2. Of course anarchism - or rather anarchy, I would say - is a force that can lead revolutions. It is the force of the people themselves. That was what had to be crushed by the Bolsheviks in Kronstadt and Ukraine.
3. Nothing else but anarchy - the spirit of freedom - can overthrow power. The only thing anarchy cannot and does not wish to do is to replace that power with another one.
4. Anarchism is not about "coordinating" groups (from some central position, presumably!). It is about people having the freedom to organise themselves in whatever way they wish. This doesn't have to be a laborious process that would preclude decisive action. At times of crisis people emerge (like Makhno) who play a "leading" role in a struggle without seeking any kind of formal authority. Revolt inspired by anarchist ideals is organic and natural, unleashing the untapped creative power of the people rather than seeking to contain, control and ultimately crush it, as power-hungry authoritarians of both "left" and "right" always seek to do.
I found Sutton's work on the Russian revolution, let alone the later Soviet Union, full of unsubstantiated innuendo and dubious inference if not outright factual error, as have other critics. Sutton himself was connected to the Hoover Institution, a major rightwing, anticommunist think tank. Maybe he's primarily the one under influence of capital.
Accounts from leftwing critics of the Russian revolution in the U$, like Chomsky, likewise carry an anticommunist approach which reduces its complexity to the sinister or evil Bolsheviks, often abstractly conceived in deontextualized quotes of theory apart from historical analysis of events on the ground and appreciation for problems they presented all parties to the revolution, not least of all the devastation of WW1 and the counter-revolutionary invasion by capitalist states like the U$ and Britain.
Besides there being no ism that's not full of ideological differences, any of these are subject to distortion by adherents and hijacking by contrary interests (e.g., philanthropic colonialism), not least of all anarchism(s) that are little more than bourgeois libertarianism or controlled oppositions of woke leftists or inverted fascists like antifa. In my experience, some of the most sectarian dogmatists obstructing actual organizing, especially among working class people beyond the echo chambers of armchair radicals, have been those calling themselves anarchists, in ways which wound be incomaparble to past tradition like the Wobbles, for example.
Thank you, Sir, good that we talk about this. But standard conspiracy theories can't get us far enough. Please, check David Livingston. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KU37xo8DGvY
Important. Insightful. Thanks!
It seems to me that between Sutton, Quigley and G. Edward Griffin, one would have many red-pilling bases covered.
Quite the photo of sayanim-extraordinaire "Lucky" Larry Silverstein ... looks like a cross between Bill Gates and Henry Kissinger!
"Lucky Larry! Every morning, without exception, Larry Silverstein took his breakfast at Windows on the World atop the north tower of the WTC. Until the morning of September 11, when he had an appointment with a dermatologist."
I would never claim that the anarchist movement is "undefilable", Helen. In fact, I've spent quite a lot of time describing exactly how it has been defiled... But it remains true that, unlike communism, it is an unsuitable ideological vehicle for authoritarian state control! It is the principles behind real anarchism which are important. These reach further and deeper than anarchism itself and could animate some new socio-political outlook drawing on the best of human wisdom.
Are we not then in the realm of insubstantial ideas and not of human reality? I'm deeply suspicious of all isms, ideals, agendas... Do we really need to hang our truths on ideologies? I believe we are in times where everything is being stripped away from what actually is. From what I know of you I can see you are doing an amazing job in stripping back the layers of confustication and it's fascinating reading all about it. Personally I have to stop at signing up for an ideology which is purported to be the one true way to righting all wrongs, though.
And as I've elsewhere recently been accused of the No True Scotsman fallacy (on the subject of Christianity), I am wondering how this works with anarchists too? Who gets to decide who is no longer an anarchist, if the person in question is still insisting that they are one? This is a genuine question! If you are not guilty of this fallacy here then maybe I wasn't either!
On the subject of Marxism and anarchism, I would love you to have a conversation with Rhyd Wildermuth, Paul, as it would really help me to see more clearly what is going on there. I highly respect both your work and am intrigued by this major difference in outlook between you.
Anarchism, although it ends with "-ism", isn't really an ideology in the way that Marxism is. It's the political manifestation of something much older, of the human awareness of our belonging to nature, and to organic life-energy, and thus of having no need for the artifice of states and authorities to tell us how to live or how to think. It's close to Taoism, in many ways, which itself is not a religion of the top-down kind, in theory or in practice. I have written quite a lot about all this, so if you really want to understand where I am coming from, I'd recommend having a look at The Anarchist Revelation
https://winteroakpress.files.wordpress.com/2021/05/the-anarchist-revelation-w.pdf
and/or Nature, Essence and Anarchy
https://winteroakpress.files.wordpress.com/2021/05/nature-essence-anarchy-w-1.pdf
Cheers
Thank you Paul. I'm new to anarchism, as you can probably tell! Thanks for the links. What you say makes sense, though there is still a niggling resistance in me to having to give a name to what is our birth right. It seems part of what can divide us - claiming the truth lies in this or that concept which a word can signify. I shall take this away and ponder.
"The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao;
The name that can be named is not the eternal name" - Lao Tzu.
I think the same is true of the spirit we call anarchism.
Without disagreeing with Paul's point, I would add that any ideology is just the study of ideas - literally the science of ideas. When taken up by a large part of a society any ideology will have social, economic, political, and religious impact. Everyone without exception lives with some ideology or collection of ideologies governing their lives. If they are unaware, that does not make it less true. The more unaware the more easily manipulated though.
Conversely, if an ideology is held to rigidly, it leads to dogmatic or structural tribalism.
That leaves people evaluating each statement of thought on its merits. If we don't do that as individuals, it will be done for us and imposed. There is no escaping ideologies.
As soon as we accept the landscape, the more easily it is to navigate. True anarchism is harder to manipulate and it is harder to coordinate collectively.
Any system can be abused. Any ideology can be abused - will be. Some ideologies are clearly bad. Many are mixed. But, if you have no ideology, you abuse yourself because by default you have no way to truly evaluate.
Oh I like this! Thank you.
Your last sentence is leading me to wonder about ideologies being part and parcel of how we navigate our way through (the constructs of - as many say...) space and time, our materiality. We probably aren't abusing ourselves if we don't have any ideologies on the level of non-material frequencies? But for now we appear to be very much involved in our earthly world and as you say need to be acutely aware of how we are navigating it and crucially how others are doing so and when they are trying to convince us that their way is the only one. Stuff like that.
Yes. And there are amaterial ideologies (or philosophies or even theologies). There are ideological mixes. And there are ideologies that are resolutely materialist. Some philosophies are meant to be thought exercises aimed at helping understand complex interactions in simple terms. Helpful if used properly. Horribly reductive if applied without question. However you slice it, the best ideologies (healthiest), elevate the human condition and provide a framework for resilience, purpose, and understanding. The worst are unhealthy straight jackets that promise security and prescribe understanding. The worst ideologies offer a counterfeit of healthy existence, but there is comfort in predictability even unhealthy predictability. "Stuff like that" is at the heart of what it means to be human.
Regarding the WEF before they set up the Young Global Leaders program (known as Global Leaders of Tomorrown until 2003) in 1991 visited St Petersburg, Russia (aka Leningrad) in late 1990 and while there met with 3 young Soviets. One of them was Putin and yes Klaus Schwab was one of the WEF visitors. If you were to ask me I’d suggest that this was a pivotal meeting where the WEF was taught the lessons that those who had been running Komosol had learnt about such programs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Komsomol
I consider WEF to be tight with BRICS and an enemy of the West.
Silverstein and his son were in the habit of having breakfast in the restaurant at the top of one of the towers. Except that day, the 11th September.
And if I remember correctly one of Australia’s ardent zionists, Frank Lowy, owned the retail lease on the bottom floors, and like Silverstein he had taken it up not long before 9/11. It really is past time that these guys were taken to task for their potential roles in this crime (assumed innocent until proven guilty but….).
Paul, have you read G. Edward Griffin’s “The Creature from Jekyll Island”? It covers bankster funding of the Bolshevik Revolution, J.P. Morgan being a front man for the Rothschilds, the secretive hatching of the Federal Reserve, the weaponization of inflation, the progression toward world socialism, and *so* much more. I haven’t finished it yet, but it overlaps with much of what you’ve written and adds dimensions I hadn’t previously encountered.
See also Doc Malik’s podcast with Griffin:
• https://rumble.com/v3mcpus-where-does-money-come-from-who-controls-it-why-is-life-so-difficult-and-mor.html
No, I haven't actually. Thanks for the tip, MAA!
"The Creature from Jekyll Island" is the classic on the topic of the Federal Reserve.
Jekyll Island, Georgia (USA), is where the usual suspects met to hatch "The Creature", a.k.a. The Fed.
Well, it isn't really about communism or Bolshevism then is it? We ought to be focusing on the financial oligarchy. In the US, anti-communism was (and seems to have anachronistically been given new life) the state religion. It was used to destroy the workers movement that frightened the ruling class in the 1930's. It worth noting that JFK, RFK, MLK (and many others) were accused of being "soft on communism" or being actual communists. They were assassinated not because they wanted to institute totalitarian rule, but because they challenged it. This focus on communism blinded us from seeing the real enemy that was celebrating a massive increase wealth and power post WWII and entrenched that power with new institutions like the CIA ("capitalism's secret army"). Anarchism could have been the vehicle for the power grab by the financial oligarchy. Then we would be bemoaning anarchism not communism. (I am pretty sure that Identity Politics came out of (lifestyle) anarchist circles.) But in either case, it misses the target. We should be focusing on the real enemy, not their dupes.
Anti-communism was created and exploited by the very same networks, as the article explains. No, anarchism could never have been the vehicle for a power grab by the financial oligarchy, because anarchism is intrinsically opposed to power from above. That is what we need today - philosophies of opposition that are incompatible with, and thus unhijackable by, the criminocracy. Communism - marxism - does not fall into this category. It is therefore a dead end, a waste of time, a "red herring" in terms of authentic resistance.
Paul, how is it, then, that so many anarchists have fallen for the globalist narratives of recent years - covid and gender identity in particular? An "ism" is only as undefilable as the people it attracts, isn't it?
Anarchists or socialists? The second seem to be State slaves.
I mean anarchists. I'm an expert in neither anarchism nor socialism, but I am aware that proponents of neither have been immune to the recent polarising narratives on viruses and gender. That many socialists have fallen for them isn't news. As I'm only now coming into contact with those who describe themselves as anarchists, I've only recently been hearing about the experiences of those who have been cast out of their communities by their fellows who have religiously swallowed these narratives.
Interesting. I guess Anarchism has been infiltrated as well but maybe it comes down to class more often than ideology.
Do you mean the "lower" the class the more immune to ideology? I think that may be broadly true, if not across the board. I was listening the After Skool with Govinder on that very subject this week
Ok, I will give you that. (Although had the cash spigot been opened to the anarchists, who knows how their ideas would change.) Anarchism can provide resistance, but it can't lead a revolution. It is easy for a centralized power with state of the art weapons and unlimited financial resources to pick off decentralized bands of resistance. Anarchism will be great once entrenched power is overthrown. But it cannot overthrow it. How are you going to make decisions or coordinate disparate anarchist groups? Thru consensus? That's what killed OWS. They couldn't make decisions, even crucial ones like how to defend themselves when the cops would inevitably come.
1. Anarchists who change their idea for financial gain have ceased to be anarchists.
2. Of course anarchism - or rather anarchy, I would say - is a force that can lead revolutions. It is the force of the people themselves. That was what had to be crushed by the Bolsheviks in Kronstadt and Ukraine.
3. Nothing else but anarchy - the spirit of freedom - can overthrow power. The only thing anarchy cannot and does not wish to do is to replace that power with another one.
4. Anarchism is not about "coordinating" groups (from some central position, presumably!). It is about people having the freedom to organise themselves in whatever way they wish. This doesn't have to be a laborious process that would preclude decisive action. At times of crisis people emerge (like Makhno) who play a "leading" role in a struggle without seeking any kind of formal authority. Revolt inspired by anarchist ideals is organic and natural, unleashing the untapped creative power of the people rather than seeking to contain, control and ultimately crush it, as power-hungry authoritarians of both "left" and "right" always seek to do.
RE: ...(like Makhno) who play a "leading" role without seeking any kind of formal authority...
Right. Every movement has leaders, either they are elected and accountable or they
un-elected and unaccountable. And this can overthrow global capitalism??? This is a religion not reality.
I found Sutton's work on the Russian revolution, let alone the later Soviet Union, full of unsubstantiated innuendo and dubious inference if not outright factual error, as have other critics. Sutton himself was connected to the Hoover Institution, a major rightwing, anticommunist think tank. Maybe he's primarily the one under influence of capital.
Accounts from leftwing critics of the Russian revolution in the U$, like Chomsky, likewise carry an anticommunist approach which reduces its complexity to the sinister or evil Bolsheviks, often abstractly conceived in deontextualized quotes of theory apart from historical analysis of events on the ground and appreciation for problems they presented all parties to the revolution, not least of all the devastation of WW1 and the counter-revolutionary invasion by capitalist states like the U$ and Britain.
Besides there being no ism that's not full of ideological differences, any of these are subject to distortion by adherents and hijacking by contrary interests (e.g., philanthropic colonialism), not least of all anarchism(s) that are little more than bourgeois libertarianism or controlled oppositions of woke leftists or inverted fascists like antifa. In my experience, some of the most sectarian dogmatists obstructing actual organizing, especially among working class people beyond the echo chambers of armchair radicals, have been those calling themselves anarchists, in ways which wound be incomaparble to past tradition like the Wobbles, for example.
Any ism can be used for camouflage
Thank you, Sir, good that we talk about this. But standard conspiracy theories can't get us far enough. Please, check David Livingston. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KU37xo8DGvY