Exile in the age of degenerate socialism, 1
We know that all of our institutions are corrupt because the Left has subverted them, and the masses are constantly conditioned to trance with slogans and false Marxist models. As we try to protect ourselves from the pools of human toxic waste controlled by political correctness, our next subject of interest must be exile, the natural state of the carrier of superior human values under socialist government.
We are using the word “exile” to refer to the victims of socialism. “Alienation” is the term socialists use to refer to the workers under capitalism.
Capitalism is exploitive of workers insofar as the workers are underpaid or mistreated. These abuses have been fixed in the West but remain under Communism. Communism mistreats its workers and underpays them worse than capitalism. The only reason this is not at the forefront of your consciousness is because cameras are not allowed inside Cuban, North Korean, or Venezuelan factories. Pay attention to the stories of suicides among Chinese workers and study their working conditions if you need to grasp how evil socialism is. Today the leading corporations are following the model of Soviet forced labor camps by locating their factories in Communist and socialist countries under the terms of “free trade” agreements.
The Social Democrats would like to pretend that the horrors of Communism belong to the past. They belong to the present and the future. The Left is extremely anxious and defensive about their Communist past. Most of them are not smart enough to have learned that Bolshevik means Social Democrat. The Fabians supported Stalin, and lied to protect his dictatorship. There is no such thing as a Social Democrat who will draw a line against Communism and fight.
The failure of the liberal education system to focus on the crimes of the Soviet Union is another reason the horrors of socialism are not at the front of your consciousness.
Here we’ll give a nod to Glenn Beck, who pointed out succintly on his FOX TV program that the idea of prison camps as a “solution” to “overpopulation” comes from Fabian Socialists such as George Bernard Shaw. Shaw and the other British Fabians supported Stalin’s prison camps and genocides. The wolf in sheep’s clothing is still the official symbol of Fabian Socialism.
The Communists considered the “alienated masses” to be so stupid that they were supposed to be guided by the Marxist cadre and the party line. But remember the old Russian joke, “the government pretends to pay us and we pretend to work.” Everyone in Russia knew that Communism was a disastrous failure.
In Russia the population that managed to survive its genocides and prison camps became addicted to alcohol, riddled with sex diseases, and distrustful of everyone. It is very difficult to build anything once socialism takes over because the entire population becomes forcibly degraded. Russia is now paying women to bear children in order to avoid permanent population decline.
We have found it difficult to research the history of resistance to socialism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. This should be the first topic taught in public school. Instead, so little has been written on this topic that we do not have a solid basis for understanding how resistance was organized. But one thing is certain, the resistance was not strong enough to effect anything of significance. The best it could do was preserve literature and form a black market.
It’s important to hold the history of Communism close to the forefront of your consciousness if you are going to become a resister. The rebellion against Russian and Eastern European Communism is the best model we have. It did produce one great result, the 1989 “Velvet Revolution” in Prague. Communism fell before mass protest along with other favorable developments. However, Prague would not have been a successful resistance if the Soviet leaders had decided to repress it.
Now that the United States has been taken over, there is no government that can counter socialism. There will be no escape from the socialist New World Order. The plans for erasing national borders and forming supergovernments to rule over regional unions is proceeding. Debt crisis and financial crisis are opportunities to introduce more centralized control mechanisms. No socialist nation is scaling back its police state bureaucracy.
The exile is the carrier of superior human values living in the degraded Marxist pseudo-culture. Your present condition is that of exile under global socialism, or brainwashed useful idiot.
Review of Andrei Codrescu, The Disappearance of the Outside, Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1990.
Codrescu was a bright Romanian dissident writer who took exile in the United States in the 1960s. His description of life under Communism provides a model for our own exile inside the United States.
But Codrescu made an important error. Intoxicated with the possibility of freedom, he interpreted the chaos of the 1960s cultural rebellion as freedom and respect for ethnic traditions. Today we know that the Cultural Marxists and the CIA were directing the rebellion and it really wasn’t oriented toward freedom but toward socialist takeover. All of those who were interested in “radical liberation” were ensnared in cultural socialism.
The element of Communist control that defined public attitudes in Romania was official censorship. Of course, the Communist authorities were involved in more than censorship, but Codrescu does not describe the official police state terror policies, he focuses on censorship. As we read Codrescu must be able to make the link between censorship (and worse) under Communism in the East and the power centers of censorship and disinformation (and worse) in the West — media, bureaucracies, politicians, parties, unions, and teachers.
“The perfect system of censorship created an atmosphere of boredom and thus gave rise to an appetite for the forbidden. The censors compiled lists of forbidden books that then beckoned everyone interested in knowledge.”
The forbidden subject in the West is not capitalism and democracy but conspiracy history, the history of Communism. The Left does not fear capitalism and democracy, they are easily taken over. The Left fears fascist armies and white resistance and defunding. Any group the Left labels as “crazy” can be our model for resistance. Resisters should try to become what the Left fears most.
“Censorship was also self-censorship of anyone who wanted to survive in the official society. The state of society became insecurity in the face of the forbidden views, and the attachment of wild and transcendent hope to the mysteries of what was forbidden.”
Holding wild and transcendent hopes is not the emotional state of the exile in the West. Capitalism and democracy and science hold no mystery for us, we know how they play out and serve socialism.
Codrescu likens the daily changes in censorship to weather requiring a weather report, an underground stream of gossip about what was allowed and what was forbidden.
Today this “underground stream of gossip” is above ground. TV reports on the Left’s speech codes and punishments for independent thought. Schools are brainwashing factories. Bureaucrats regulate. The public square is a liberal wasteland.
“Writers living in the country were often forbidden to write anything and had their previous works erased from history. Many writers shuffled between prison and menial jobs. Their persecution made them heroes. Meanwhile, the officially approved intellectuals in the universities had to invent ever more conservative forms that were empty of content and did not refer to anything. These, the self-censored, were alcoholics who reluctantly appeared at the Writers Union conferences and then left as soon as possible so that they could drink. The hack writers in the bureaucracies and the newspapers were officially elevated and put on display as a kind of ghost of a writer. The official writers constituted a fake folk art, the kitsch horror of socialism.”
The journalists and professors in the West today are similar hacks, with or without the alcohol. These pseudo-intellectuals are paraded at Left-wing conferences where party-line slogans and useless analysis are dispensed. For the masses who can’t make it to the conferences, the Jon Stewart show, Charlie Rose, PBS.
“This situation led to hermeticism, to writing in code, writing in secret, keeping the links with the past alive but calculating the risk involved, dissecting propaganda with surrealism, but always in danger of becoming the object of the next crackdown.”
Notice Codrescu’s error here, believing Surrealism was a way to break the propaganda stream. Surrealism is Communism.
“Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich appeared during the Khrushchev thaw. We know now that the thaw was calculated and controlled by Khrushchev, a pseudo-thaw to support pseudo-de-Stalinization. Reading was allowed when a break with the past was necessary. But in 1974 Solzhenitsyn was arrested and deported to West Germany. For him personally it was a trial because he was unfamiliar with the twentieth century. He was the embodiment of the moral nineteenth century Russian literary tradition now exposed to the world outside Russia. This was a continuation of the Slavophile mystical anarchist debate that had been interrupted by Lenin. He was the inside turned out.”
The very definition of cultural subversion and corruption is, of course, turning the genuine culture from the inside to the outside, to exile.
Of interest: 200 Years Together Wolfgang Strauss, The End of the Legends
New World Order University and the anti-EU forces in Europe represent the inside of the European tradition turned outside. We have difficulty absorbing mystical anarchism, so we just refer to “European traditions.” Actually, anything is better than socialism, so we’re not trying to set limits on what alternatives you can access.
“But the inside of Stalinist Russia, inside the prison camps, was where the intellectual energy was. Here was concentrated the hunger, the degradation, the torture, the heroism and the brutality and the triumph of the human spirit under Communism. This was the only thing worth knowing about life under Communism, that under the worst conditions some managed to express the human spirit. Inside the prison system was where the freedom of the mind was being expressed.”
“The handwritten and typed manuscripts that passed hand to hand were called the literature of samizdat. Khrushchev’s dissidents sent to the West for display were pseudo-dissidents. Real dissidents were hard to find; the system demanded that show dissidents be manufactured and suffer Soviet justice, otherwise the machinery of suppression might go slack.”
The socialist system requires that dissenters be publicly humiliated. So far there is a sufficient supply of dissenters to whip up the masses in disgust and outrage that someone opposes Communism. At the moment the focus of humiliation is any white guy who says “nigger,” prays, or smokes cigarettes.
Codrescu embraced exile as the promise of freedom in the tradition of the famous Romanian exiles, which included Tristan Tzara, Eugene Ionesco, Mircea Eliade, Constantin Brancusi, and Emil Cioran. Physical exile for Codrescu formed a kind of Platonic state, an international free idea state. “However, one must reside in a nation, which involves bureaucratic processing, learning a new language, and the likelihood of cultural isolation. Nabokov had written about the problem of living among ‘French aborigines…as flat and transparent as figures cut out of cellophane’ with which no real communication was possible.”
But Codrescu did not complain about the Americans as cellophane figures. He imagined his exile had led him to freedom.
We have no such illusions now that the world is becoming a closed system.
Codrescu arrived in an America in the 1960s in which pseudo-exile was the condition of the young who had been hypnotized by Cultural Marxism. America was a culture of fads rather than values, and the celebration of ethnicity was an enduring fad at the end of the twentieth century. Moreover, exile from the mother culture was the self-chosen state of the American intellectual. Codrescu easily imagined that he was joining other exiles in exile because he was oriented toward the fantasy of a benign Left.
But today the campaigns against genuine culture have succeeded so thoroughly that Leftists can no longer pose as exiles. The genuine exiles are all on the Right now. We are not convinced that there is an American mother culture anymore. Perhaps some sharp student could take on the project of defining the elements of a common white culture in today’s Communist diversity wasteland.
In Part 2 we will explore whether Codrescu’s experience can help us become more effective exiles.
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