Exile in the age of degenerate socialism, 2
If you are a good person, you are an exile under the socialist dictatorship. Exile is your true status, no matter how well off you are or how stable your life looks today. If you participate in any liberal institution, you are a socialist collaborator, not an exile.
We are examining Andrei Codrescu, The Disappearance of the Outside, Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1990, in search of models for successful exile. Codrescu’s situation of exile was not exactly the same as ours today, so we are making comments about parallels and contrasts.
“The philosophy of the Exile is that life is a Fall from Paradise, and history is the continual displacement of man from his home. It forms an ‘atemporal and aspatial identity.’ It elevates escape and motion. Exile is the place ‘where culture is not.’ It is the condition of being Outside. The positive result is that one can view all cultures without being invested in them, so one grasps a total understanding. The negative result is that there is no connection with or commitment to existing structures.”
Codrescu is being a little Romantic here. The problem is not a fall but infiltration of American institutions by radical subversives. This Communist occupation was naked and open in Romania, but in the United States the Marxists have adopted American democratic language in their propaganda. One can criticize the propaganda and lay bare the lies, but after while this exercise becomes repetitive and less useful. Everyone knows the socialists are lying, the problem today is that many well-intentioned people participate in the institutions the socialists have taken over. They must be nudged to recognize their true condition, exile in their own country. “Escape and motion” would open the unbridgeable divide between good and evil for all to see.
Codrescu views the struggle for independence from the Soviet Empire as one that will eventually bring these Eastern European countries into a featureless global village of the West.
Codrescu gives no hint that he was familiar with Stalin’s plan to form the European Union and the United Nations, but his small miss, to the end game of the global village, is close enough to Stalin’s totalitarian vision that it makes no significant difference.
“The idea of Europe was destroyed in Europe but preserved in Romania, a satellite of Europe. This enraged the Left, who have abandoned the idea that man can be helped to understand himself and his life through literature. The intellectual center is uninhabited, abandoned, and its appearance at the fringe arouses anger on the Left.”
The Left still gets extremely angry whenever some intellectual life appears in their wasteland.
“The Left also appropriated the idea of exile and assigned it to Lenin and Stalin. These heroes of the revolution were promoted with massive propaganda campaigns as wise and idealistic. Stalin’s name appeared on all the textbooks in the Soviet Union. The naïve children must have been led to believe that he knew everything.”
Actually Stalin was a bank robber and train robber, Lenin was first a landowner and then a thief and an extortionist in Europe during his exile. Both were cold, heartless, vicious personalities, the logical outcome of believing in socialist materialism. All socialists are gangsters, experts in theft.
But as socialism rewrites its history to exclude Stalin and Lenin, the exile has no particular standing with today’s Marxist media. They are obsessed with power and turn gangsters into celebrities. They don’t uphold exile as noble rebellion, they are fascinated with the International Conference. That is because rebellion is no longer needed. The teachers and bureaucrats and social scientists are all Marxists now, the institutions have control over the masses. The squabbling at international conferences is between factions of the Left. Factionalism is the permanent feature of the Marxist ideology.
Notice, today, that in Greece the socialists who are losing their jobs are shifting their support to the Communists rather than blaming the socialists for bankrupting their country with overspending. The socialists who are losing their government jobs should be supporting an honest small-scale capitalist economy in an independent Greece, but they are addicted to government. This is the level of stupidity and weakness socialism causes.
“The center in the West is the electronic media. Its discourse is mechanical. Its greatest challenge is the exile. Art-workers feed the electronic beast with quick and painless entertainment, ‘looks’ for the market. These writers express their self-loathing by increased anti-materialist idealism that causes cycles of revolt and the production of new styles. The medium only cares that there be no gaps, which would allow time for thought and the possibility of reentry of the marginalized.”
For example, imagine the scandal to the Left if all the white males who had been denied jobs because of affirmative action or censored from political correctness were to take over the media and tell their stories. This simply cannot be allowed.
“The true artist, the exile who is not part of the media, must invent an entirely new world of imagination that cannot be swallowed by the mechanical machine of media equality. The exile should be doomed to failure, should be broken by his exile. The only thing that keeps him afloat is faith. This is in contrast to the art worker, whose attitude is entirely loss of faith. The exiled artist represents a pure currency, while all the art workers’ styles inflate in money value. To gain weight, art workers borrow the character of the exile or the attitude of the exile.”
In the East, the beast was the bureaucracy of words, the total blanketing of everyone with endless lies in a prison of words. In the West the beast of lies is the media stream of fantasy images and the associated image industries. But we must also include the official bureaucracies, the schools, the political parties, the hidden funded network of cadre activists, the lobbyists, the government-corporation nexus of cooperation.
“Kafka is the artist who guards the crossroads between official reality and the exiled nomad under Communism. The bureaucrats are the interior consciousness of the new interiors, the gas chambers, listening posts, and prison camps. They do not know how to live Outside. They are bugs. They know the maps of the labyrinth, the organization of the camps, the ministries, the assembly lines, the spooks and counteragents. Kafka is an unwanted tourist who maps the new space. He is the father of dissident literature.”
“The bureaucrat takes on the faux personality of adult self-importance masking emptiness. His job is to cover all cracks mapping the interior.”
The weakness of the socialist activists and true believers is their hollowness, the brokenness of their inner lives. This theme has yet to be exploited in American literature. Someone must write the novel of socialist bureaucrats who are really just immature adolescents bent on serving their own addictions and perversions. Perhaps the biography of Bill Clinton will cover this theme. Whoever does it will open new comedic ground and expose the Marxist “comedians” as poseurs.
“Exiles map the space of the controlled interior, at least the part they know. This knowledge quickly exhausts the bureaucratic secretion of the media, which is a facade of fantasy nostalgia. The literature of exile is written according to different architectures of memory. The contents pour the Inside into the Outside and poison it with a moral crusade of anger. This process of freeing memory conflicts with the official bureaucratic project of redefining the Outside as Inside or at least neutralizing the Outside. Both of these literatures are in conflict with technology, which seeks the optimum innovation with no restraint.”
In the Western academies, Marxist deconstructionists and postmodernists are neutralizing the autonomy of all literature as much as possible through denial of the possibility of experience giving rise to truth and denial of the legitimacy of all previous literary works.
“The Marxists believe the Outside disappeared at the end of the nineteenth century. Since Rimbaud, all Outside literature is a repetition of previous literature or self-referential, unless it maps the interior of the totalitarian labyrinth.”
But please don’t allow the Marxists to define literature for you. Marxists don’t believe in literature or reading. Reading creates individuals.
“Marxists, who believe that man is merely a collection of molecules accidentally formed from impersonal forces, cannot imagine. That is, they are literal-minded and cannot move beyond the concrete and the abstractions of ideology. They have no capacity to locate anything outside their system.”
That’s why listening to Marxists pontificate on TV is so funny. They are utterly clueless and clueless that they are clueless. That’s because Marxism forces the closing of all systems, the closing of all minds.
Like Freemasons, the Marxists do not know the meaning of their rituals.
“Their history is pure ideology, pure erasing and rewriting in formulas. They have no interest in history, only their texts rewriting history. They can only produce interiors. They have even eliminated the worker from history. The worker is only a symbol of Marxist legitimacy. They are not revolutionaries but state bureaucrats.”
This turning point of Marxist propaganda occurred in 1957, when Khrushchev, in the midst of de-Stalinization, changed the term “worker” to the term “people.” Khrushchev was well aware that the workers were becoming well off in America and Europe and could not be relied upon to serve the revolution.
“Barthes and the deconstructionists extended the text to everything by asserting that the world can be read. The world is a text without a single author, though some parts of it are authorized and some are not. But the unauthorized parts that have not been rewritten in official legalese still exist as Outside. The Outside is unstable, and it contains escape routes. Moreover, it exerts pressure on the official Inside. The purpose of the censorship is to guard against an eruption.”
Notice that the Left allows eruptions on the Left because these can be easily controlled. These eruptions don’t count. The real eruptions are on the Right.
The practical question of interest is whether the Outside contains any pressure points or escape routes today. The intellectual question of interest has to do with arguing with the socialist cosmos, the definition of the entire world as socialist world order.
Semiotics as a discipline is a form of censorship, that is, it is Marxist ideology projected upon all forms of communication, even forms of communication that the Marxist semiotician invents. Censorship doesn’t work perfectly, there are tea party eruptions. But contrast this timid protest with the organized Communist riots in the streets of Europe, Madison, Wisconsin, or Philadelphia. Real violence. The controlled protests of the Left are destructive, well-funded, well-organized, stable and persisting. The controlled protests by the Communist labor organizers are more effective and enduring than the real protest, the tea party.
The tea party has decided to become irrelevant by turning its attention to the primary elections. With this turn, the talk of secession by the states disappeared. Those who believe that elections matter must remember that the voting districts are gerrymandered and the unions count the votes. How many elections in the United States have been rigged? Too many to count.
There has never been a genuine eruption against socialism in the United States, but there were genuine eruptions in Prague and Hungary.
“However, the exiles write in a language that has disappeared, and their values, that which they reference, disappear quickly. The exiles must compete with exiles such as Lenin, who returned and made himself the hero, the new king. Exiles bring tales of the Outside and make it amenable to further conquest. Their particular territories can then be colonized, turning Outside into Inside. The text of the exile is turned over to the bureaucratic knowledge-worker for imitation and subversion. It becomes really just a representation or hallucination, which becomes the official version, and colonizers are sent to settle the hallucination. Barbed wire, photographs, study groups, filing cabinets for records, maps, raiding parties of journalists are sent. This colonization of anything different becomes a commodity. If it cannot be colonized, it is not shown on TV. It becomes impossible, absurd, denied.”
Actually the video is changing this situation somewhat. The real dissidents can videotape their tea party rallies, or Obamaville tent cities. Today the video has substituted for the literature of dissent that prevailed under Soviet and Eastern European Communism.
The problem for dissenters and exiles is infiltration and disinformation by the official spies, who want to manufacture pseudo-dissidents and control them. The tea party immediately faced the problem of Leftist infiltration and provocation, accompanied by video cameras. The pure literary exile is rare because writing is now rare.
“The exile ends up feeding his words to the official spies, who then send colonizing missions to incorporate resistance movements into the control bureaucracies.”
“The true exiles do not read their new surroundings into the official record but use oblique strategies of nomadic mystery. But it is increasingly difficult to assume another identity, to be heard only by those whom one wishes to address. The best strategy is to create texts that resemble official texts, the corresponding strategy to disinformation campaigns by the center.”
We are still contemplating “oblique strategies of nomadic mystery.” This sounds to us like inventing a new code language known only to the true dissenters. But writing seems Romantic today, in the era of direct violent confrontations and internet video publishing.
“The imagination is the opponent of the virtual. The virtual seeks to replace imagination, to defeat it, make it dwindle. Programming replaces creativity.”
The imagination is of central importance in defining a nonsocialist world-cosmos.
(Henri Matisse wrote, “As long as we can create, we are not defeated” during the Nazi occupation of France. But let’s not be naive. There is no fascist cavalry to rescue us from Communism.)
“The exile imagines the nothing that exists behind all the official simulacra.”
Actually, we do have a good idea of the nothing that exists behind all the official simulacra. When they throw party at the White House, they dance to black illuminati music. They drink and do drugs and congratulate themselves on their good luck. Obama golfs and travels and accepts Nobel Peace Prizes and gets gay blowjobs. He doesn’t pay attention to issues he’s not interested in. There is nothing inside the hollow men but perversions, addictions, and greed, and this emptiness is the scandal the Left cannot discuss.
“The image-destroying imagination of the exile must be generative and unframed like fire. The exile consciousness is sober, monastic. His best strategy is the disruption of the joining function in the collage. The true art form of resistance is anti-collage.”
“Escape must be imagined or all is lost. The next generation will live in a dystopia without any access to history.”
Codrescu’s “next generation” is this generation. Codrescu could not have foreseen how degraded the masses would become between 1968 and 2011. They do not desire honest institutions, they desire drugs, subsidies, vulgarity, spectacle, pure escape.
“One must avoid feeding one’s words to the center.”
The literature of exile in the United States has been the literature of ghosting, the strategy for dealing with feminists, the rude radical Negroes, white race-traitors, and immigrant gangs. Stepping around, avoiding contamination, dropping out, rising above, choosing one’s route carefully. Refusing to support those businesses involved with the anti-male and anti-white agenda. Seeking rural refuges. Thinking about saving something that might persist through these Dark Ages and be of use to a young man of good spirit born in the far-distant future who might be curious enough to sift through the false history and propaganda, discover the history of human greatness, and wonder how it all went wrong.
The true spirit of exile under Communism involved mapping the interiors of the totalitarian media and bureaucracies, pointing to various escape routes, linking of those Outside in common purpose, documentation of the crimes and perversions of the Insiders, and a positive culture of disruption.
We are still pondering Codrescu’s term “anti-collage” and searching for effective resistance strategies. For one thing, the reestablishment of the true narrative of the historical links among all the subversive groups, The Hidden Masters Who Rule the World. Connecting the dots. Increasingly, for us, anti-collage involves debunking disinformation and establishing the true historical narrative. Let’s recall the quote from Milan Kundera we cited months ago, “We are compelled to forget by the collage style of the mass media.” Anti-collage promotes remembering. What must we remember? Who took us over, how they did it. There was a time when life was lived outside socialist control systems. People fought and died opposing socialism. Remember the heroes of the struggle.
There is no educated audience of any size devoted to resistance of the New World Order today. We tip our cap to the tea party for showing a little spirit, but they lack knowledge of the history of planning for the New World Order in the American colonies. Most of them admire Thomas Jefferson and the other Illuminati revolutionaries. They think in terms of Illuminati slogans. Many of them support feminism, free trade bureaucracies, the black civil rights takeover, the gay agenda, free speech, public schools, the United Nations, foreign wars, and any con artist claiming to be green.
The exile maps the Outside of the socialist prison camp. We shall define the Outside as any country that did not experience the Enlightenment, has not signed free trade agreements, and has banned television. It is there we shall contemplate tales of nomadic mystery and anti-collage.
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