"Only radical thought is fruitful, for it is the only one capable of creating daring ideas to destroy the ruling ideological order and enable us to free ourselves from the vicious circle of a failing system of civilisation".

-Guillaume Fayé.

What is Russia? Slavophiles and Westerners

'By the 1840s one question overshadowed all others in the polemics conducted on the pages of the "thick journals," and it provided a fundamental marker by which membership in this or that camp could be determined. It was quite simply "What is Russia?" Although others had raised it earlier, it was posed in acute form in 1836 by a retired Guards officer, Petr Chaadaev. In a letter to a minor journal, written, significantly, in French, he asserted that Russia was a cultural nonentity. Suspended uneasily between the civilizations of Europe and Asia, it had not borrowed anything culturally fruitful from either. "Alone in the world, we have given nothing to the world, learned nothing from the world, and bestowed not a single idea upon the fund of human ideas. We have not contributed in any way to the progress of the human spirit, and whatever has come to us from that progress we have disfigured." One way or another, his challenge posed the most important question Russian intellectuals had to face for decades to come.'

The Slavophiles

'Some, who became known as "Slavophiles," reacted by declaring that Chaadaev was mistaken, that Russia did have its own distinctive culture and its own valuable contribution to make to mankind's progress. … The leading Slavophile thinkers came from landowning families, and their milieu was still the salon rather than the kruzhok. Ivan Kireevskii, after studying the Greek church fathers, rebutted Chaadaev by asserting that Russia had its own rich cultural heritage, derived from Byzantium and transmitted by the Orthodox Church. Russia had actually preserved the integrity of the Christian faith, which the West had lost, thanks to the popes' greed for secular power and to the countervailing but equally sterile individualism and rationalism of the Protestants. What gave Russian institutions, especially the village community, their peculiar value, was sobornost, conciliarity or congregationalism, the capacity to take decisions in common, by consensus, and for the greater good of the collective rather than of the individual. Aleksei Khomiakov, the major theorist of sobornost, defined it as "unity in multiplicity," the principle by which the individual finds his strength and his true purpose in common reflection and action with others. Only thus could the individual fulfil himself as a person,"not in the impotence of spiritual solitude, but in the might of his sincere spiritual union with his brothers, with his Savior." In the "West," by contrast, human beings were spiritually impoverished, caught in the toils of a heartless laissez-faire economy, and consumed by individualism, rationalism, and atheism. Renewal for European civilization could come only from Russia, where the people, ignorant and poverty-stricken though they often were, nevertheless were still illuminated by the full light of Christianity. Conservatives though they were, the Slavophiles did not accept the autocracy in its current form. They considered that Peter the Great, inspired himself by Western principles, had undermined the inherited unity of monarch and people by interposing between them a Germanized bureaucracy. … To rectify this state of affairs the Slavophiles proposed that the tsar should reconvene the zemskii sobor as a regular institution representing the estates of Russian society. They rejected Western parliamentarism and did not consider that the tsar should be bound by constitutional guarantees, but they believed that he did need the regular contact with his loyal subjects which a zemskii sobor would provide. They also wanted to restore sobornost to the church by reinstating the pomestnyi sobor as its supreme governing body, and at the lowest level by reinstating the parish council as an autonomous body empowered to choose its own pastor, run its own finances, and look after the material affairs of the congregation.'

The Westerners

'The "Westerners" were a much less homogeneous camp than the Slavophiles. It would be difficult to single out common elements in their thinking, except for the generally held assumption that Russia was fundamentally like other European countries, only delayed in its evolution by geographical and historical circumstances. The crucial difference between Slavophiles and Westerners was over the question whether, in borrowing from European culture, Russia was denying its own nature, as the Slavophiles believed, or on the contrary taking vital steps for its own renewal and development.'

Russia and the Russians, by Geoffrey Hosking

Attack on a Moorish camp - Defeat of the Saracens at the Battle of Tours, AD 732 — by Alphonse de Neuville

The Franks led by Charles Martel attack the Saracen camp at the Battle of Tours, halting the Muslim invasion in the year 732

I’ve been reflecting a lot on the authoritarian personality recently and the further away I get from that book the more I realise it’s just like fundamentally incorrect. The scope of the research being primarily psychological in nature I think prevents it from reaching any coherent definition of fascism because fascism isn’t a primarily psychological problem lol. I think the book is strongest when Adorno is talking about antisemitism as a foundational part of fascism, and how antisemitism is like a comprehensive structuring force for people’s ideological outlooks, but the moment he or any of the researchers move away from that or try to psychologically profile their research participants it gets really messy. Their psychological discussion about family and its relationship to fascism is fairly interesting, and it was what convinced me that the nuclear family just needs to be fucking abolished completely, but I think that has more to do with the fact that the nuclear family as a social unit naturally fits with fascism because that is the social unit they want to structure society around.

idk I really like that book but it’s deeply flawed. It’s one of those things that you should read alongside people like Fanon and Cesaire, who offer a critique of, respectively, the colonial character of psychology and the colonial nature of fascism, two perspectives that are not present in the authoritarian personality at all. Like I think the best way to approach that book is to fundamentally disagree with its premise (searching for the existence of a fascist “personality” type), and then see what is left salvaging afterwards

The coloniser rhetoric is so sick like it’s not a kindness to point out how global poverty cause by the very same coloniser country you descended from makes you appreciate your material comforts. That’s like coloniser 101. 

The french tv comentators are soooo annoying , they're totally killing the mood

Volume 2 ❄️

i have a confession

The Unspoken prominence of Western Civilization

In an ever-evolving world, where the boundaries between cultures blur and global connectivity shapes our narrative, it's crucial to reflect on the profound impact that Western Civilization has had on our collective human journey. "The Western Civilization" by William Kergroach stands as a testament to the enduring influence of the Western culture, offering a profound exploration of its contributions to the global tapestry.

A Tapestry of Heritage

Within the pages of this enlightening work, readers are transported through the corridors of time, uncovering the intricate layers of Western heritage. Kergroach artfully narrates the story of how Western thought, values, and innovations have left an indelible mark on the world's stage. From the profound insights of philosophy to the masterpieces of art, and the leaps of innovation that have reshaped societies, every chapter serves as a testament to the interconnectedness of cultures and the universal relevance of Western contributions.

Philosophical Foundations

The philosophical foundations that have shaped Western Civilization are a cornerstone of the book's exploration. Kergroach delves into how Western thinkers have grappled with questions of existence, morality, and the very essence of being. These philosophical undercurrents, firmly rooted in Western thought, have transcended time and continue to influence global conversations on ethics, governance, and the human experience.

Cultural Confluence

In an era where cultural exchange is as effortless as a mouse click, understanding the essence of Western art is paramount. Kergroach guides readers on a journey through the artistic expressions that have not only captivated Western audiences but have also bridged cultural gaps across the globe. Be it the timeless words of literature, the evocative chords of music, or the visual narratives painted by artists, these creations serve as an eloquent reminder of the shared human experience.

Innovative Impulses

The book also sheds light on how Western Civilization has been a crucible of innovation. From the Age of Discoveries that expanded horizons to the technological revolutions that have reshaped our world, Kergroach demonstrates that Western ingenuity has been a driving force in shaping the course of human progress. These innovations transcend borders, catalyzing intercultural exchanges and pushing humanity forward collectively.

A Global Perspective

"The Western Civilization" is a call for cultural pride; it's an invitation to recognize the prominence of the White world. As the world grows smaller and more connected, understanding the influence of Western culture fosters legitimate pride. Kergroach's exploration ignites a spark of curiosity, urging us to look beyond the surface and appreciate our roots and our ancestors masterpieces.

The Western Civilization has shaped the world civilization. it's about time to say White is beautiful

#WesternInfluence #CulturalLegacy #White #Philosophy #ArtisticExpression #Innovation #CulturalWest 📚🌍

Europeans operate on shrimp levels of racism, because they can view themselves as white saviors bringing civilisation to barbarians... who live in another part of their country and are of the same ethnicity

all systems of exploitation are socially constructed, the supposed 'ethnic' differences between parisians and bretons are exactly as 'Real' as those between scotsmen and uzbeks, which is to say, theyre all equally just after-the-fact ideological justification for existing political-economic systems. 'whiteness' an entirely homogenous category is an ideological position formed in response to and in support of the systems of chattel slavery and settler-colonisation.

There was no better political, military, diplomatic, and ideological alliance between like-minded nations than Israel and apartheid South Africa. The apartheid regime in Pretoria took power in 1948 and soon put in place Nazi-style restrictions on nonwhites, from forbidding marriage between the races to barring blacks from many jobs. The South African Jewish community was strongly pro-Israel and became the biggest financial backer of Israel per capita after 1948. A majority of these Jews benefited from South African apartheid and supported its continuation. A small but notable minority bravely opposed it and joined the African National Congress (ANC) in its campaign for liberation. By the time the South African and Israeli governments cemented a political, ideological, and military relationship in the 1970s, often centered on weapons that had been developed and tested by the Israeli military, many in the ruling Israeli Likud party felt an affinity with South Africa’s worldview. As journalist and author of The Unspoken Alliance Sasha Polakow-Suransky writes, it was an “ideology of minority survivalism that presented the two countries as threatened outposts of European civilisation defending their existence against barbarians at the gate.

Antony Loewenstein, The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World

In 1980, the Israeli columnist Boaz Evron carefully described the stages of this moral corrosion: the tactic of conflating Palestinians with Nazis and shouting that another Shoah is imminent was, he feared, liberating ordinary Israelis from ‘any moral restrictions, since one who is in danger of annihilation sees himself exempted from any moral considerations which might restrict his efforts to save himself.’ Jews, Evron wrote, could end up treating ‘non-Jews as subhuman’ and replicating ‘racist Nazi attitudes’.

Evron urged caution, too, against Israel’s (then new and ardent) supporters in the Jewish American population. For them, he argued, championing Israel had become ‘necessary because of the loss of any other focal point to their Jewish identity’ – indeed, so great was their existential lack, according to Evron, that they did not wish Israel to become free of its mounting dependence on Jewish American support.

Zygmunt Bauman, the Polish-born Jewish philosopher and refugee from Nazism who spent three years in Israel in the 1970s before fleeing its mood of bellicose righteousness, despaired of what he saw as the ‘privatisation’ of the Shoah by Israel and its supporters. It has come to be remembered, he wrote in 1988, ‘as a private experience of the Jews, as a matter between the Jews and their haters’, even as the conditions that made it possible were appearing again around the world.

[...] Anyone calling attention to the spectacle of Washington’s blind commitment to Israel is accused of antisemitism and ignoring the lessons of the Shoah. And a distorted consciousness of the Shoah ensures that whenever the victims of Israel, unable to endure their misery any longer, rise up against their oppressors with predictable ferocity, they are denounced as Nazis, hellbent on perpetrating another Shoah.

[...] One of the great dangers today is the hardening of the colour line into a new Maginot Line. For most people outside the West, whose primordial experience of European civilisation was to be brutally colonised by its representatives, the Shoah did not appear as an unprecedented atrocity. Recovering from the ravages of imperialism in their own countries, most non-Western people were in no position to appreciate the magnitude of the horror the radical twin of that imperialism inflicted on Jews in Europe. So when Israel’s leaders compare Hamas to Nazis, and Israeli diplomats wear yellow stars at the UN, their audience is almost exclusively Western. Most of the world doesn’t carry the burden of Christian European guilt over the Shoah, and does not regard the creation of Israel as a moral necessity to absolve the sins of 20th-century Europeans. For more than seven decades now, the argument among the ‘darker peoples’ has remained the same: why should Palestinians be dispossessed and punished for crimes in which only Europeans were complicit? And they can only recoil with disgust from the implicit claim that Israel has the right to slaughter 13,000 children not only as a matter of self-defence but because it is a state born out of the Shoah.

[...] Netanyahu and his cohort threaten the basis of the global order that was rebuilt after the revelation of Nazi crimes. Even before Gaza, the Shoah was losing its central place in our imagination of the past and future. It is true that no historical atrocity has been so widely and comprehensively commemorated. But the culture of remembrance around the Shoah has now accumulated its own long history. That history shows that the memory of the Shoah did not merely spring organically from what transpired between 1939 and 1945; it was constructed, often very deliberately, and with specific political ends. In fact, a necessary consensus about the Shoah’s universal salience has been endangered by the increasingly visible ideological pressures brought to bear on its memory.

[...] In Israel itself, awareness of the Shoah was limited for years to its survivors, who, astonishing to remember today, were drenched with contempt by the leaders of the Zionist movement. Ben-Gurion had initially seen Hitler’s rise to power as ‘a huge political and economic boost for the Zionist enterprise’, but he did not consider human debris from Hitler’s death camps as fit material for the construction of a strong new Jewish state. ‘Everything they had endured,’ Ben-Gurion said, ‘purged their souls of all good.’ Saul Friedlander, the foremost historian of the Shoah, who left Israel partly because he couldn’t bear to see the Shoah being used ‘as a pretext for harsh anti-Palestinian measures’, recalls in his memoir, Where Memory Leads (2016), that academic scholars initially spurned the subject, leaving it to the memorial and documentation centre Yad Vashem.

[...] It was only after the Six-Day War in 1967 and the Yom Kippur War in 1973, when Israel seemed existentially threatened by its Arab enemies, that the Shoah came to be broadly conceived, in both Israel and the United States, as the emblem of Jewish vulnerability in an eternally hostile world. [...] A Jewish political tradition preoccupied with inequality, poverty, civil rights, environmentalism, nuclear disarmament and anti-imperialism mutated into one characterised by a hyper-attentiveness to the Middle East’s only democracy. [...] Recent American literature most clearly manifests the paradox that the more remote the Shoah grew in time the more fiercely its memory was possessed by later generations of Jewish Americans.

[...] All these universalist reference points – the Shoah as the measure of all crimes, antisemitism as the most lethal form of bigotry – are in danger of disappearing as the Israeli military massacres and starves Palestinians, razes their homes, schools, hospitals, mosques, churches, bombs them into smaller and smaller encampments, while denouncing as antisemitic or champions of Hamas all those who plead with it to desist, from the United Nations, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch to the Spanish, Irish, Brazilian and South African governments and the Vatican. Israel today is dynamiting the edifice of global norms built after 1945, which has been tottering since the catastrophic and still unpunished war on terror and Vladimir Putin’s revanchist war in Ukraine. The profound rupture we feel today between the past and the present is a rupture in the moral history of the world since the ground zero of 1945 – the history in which the Shoah has been for many years the central event and universal reference.

I mean fundamentally the thing about Israel/Palestine that makes people uncomfortable is not that "it's complicated" it's that it's extremely fundamentally morally simple, it's just difficult

there is not a morally acceptable solution that will be accepted by the expansionist Israeli government or its allies in Europe and America

the balance of power has remained basically the same since Balfour handed the country over. Israel has the power to displace and kill Palestinians without accountability because it's backed by the majority of major world powers. there's fundamentally no back and forth of power. Palestine and its people were sold from the control of the British to the control of Israel for the political convenience of a bunch of people on different continents. there's no retribution or wrestle for power. Israel has had power over Palestine for decades and Palestine, despite Palestinians occupying the land for millennia, has never had power over Israel.

the fundamentals of the situation are discomforting because Israel is in many ways the last surviving bastion of the type of turn-of-the-century colonialism which the contemporary economy of Britain, America and much of the West is rooted in.

that's why the media and political classes are so invested in the Israeli party line - not because Israel ~controls the media~ or whatever but because the fundamental existence of Israel is the interests of the British ruling class, for example. It is in the interests of the British ruling class that we accept as a basic precept that there are Civilised and Uncivilised nations, and that it is right and good and natural that the Civilised nations should be able to decide the fates of the Uncivilised nations, for their own profit, without brooking any complaint from the Uncivilised Peoples. The structure of Western capitalism requires, as well, that we accept that any number of deaths and any amount of suffering among the Uncivilised Peoples is an acceptable price to pay for the comfort of Civilised Peoples. That's why the media classes are more interested in pearl clutching that somebody slashed up a hack painting of a famously antisemitic and genocidal British lord than in the loss of swathes of priceless and irreplaceable artworks, historical relics and Human Fucking Lives in Gaza.

it isn't complicated. it's just uncomfortable because fundamentally it lays bare the basic reality of colonial capitalism, and generally we in the UK are sort of trying to pretend we're over that whole thing even though we're obviously not, politicians just try to be a bit less obvious about it. so it's discomforting to people to be faced with the rawness of Israel's open colonialism, and so those who can't or don't want to divest from Britain's own ongoing colonial endeavours end up tying themselves in knots trying to justify why it's Fine Actually.

while obviously Israel is a Zionist project so it can no more be decoupled from Judaism than the British empire is decoupled from Christianity, the conflation of Jewishness and Israel is a mostly irrelevant (and harmful) distraction from the underlying Problem With Israel, which is that it's an incredibly 19th century European style of colony in 21st century Asia, and the nature, consistency and ferocity of its colonial project has been pretty unchanged for like 3-4 generations.

but it's a very successful distraction because

a) a lot of people do actually hate Jews a whole bunch so yeah antisemitism is a genuine and legitimate fear, but it doesn't connect to the core issues of genocide, oppression and colonialism (and conflating Israel with Jewishness does play into existing antisemitic ideas of the Jewish perpetual foreigner and perpetual dual loyalty)

b) people want it to be complicated. They don't want it to be simple in a way that would create discomfort for them. We don't want to acknowledge that to free Palestine we'd have to take a hit to our own economies by not selling arms to Israel. We don't want to acknowledge that what's practiced openly in Israel is the same structure of systemic injustice underpinning almost all British and American foreign affairs, but with more of a veil over it. We don't want to challenge the underlying assumption that there are those who should rule and those who should be ruled over. But with the assertion that Israel=Jewishness, and the rewriting of history to say there's an Endless Cycle of Violence on Both Sides, Who Can Say Where It Started Really, you're off the hook! It's Complicated! Who Can Really Say?

(this Who Can Really Say thing is fascinating in itself. It's not like it's ancient history! it's been slightly over a century since the birth of the Israeli project! you can look it up! we have the news articles! we have the correspondence! this is my grandparents' generation not the distant mists of time!)

but yeah like fuck 'Israel controls the media' bullshit. It does not require a Shadowy Jewish Cabal of Puppetmasters to create mass appeasement from the media and ruling class, and if you think that's the best explanation you're fucking gross. The media and political establishment of Europe and the US are not being Controlled By The Wicked Jews. They are colonial projects. Israel is a colonial project. Their interests are aligned. It's not complicated it's So Fucking Simple. Our ruling classes, whether in Tel Aviv, Washington, Westminster or Berlin, are enthusiastically invested in the project of global apartheid. It makes them money. It maintained them power. It is in their interests to preserve the impunity of the occupying state where it shores up the civilised West vs barbarian East paradigm. It is not "too complicated" it's just huge, implacable and miserable to recognise.

I swear that USamericans seem to think of every nation other than their own, especially outside the Imperial Core, as politically homogeneous. So if they're arguing about the political situation in that country and they can find someone from there who agrees with their opinions they'll use that person as an instant gotcha. I'm not saying that when talking about something that you should disregard the lived experience of the people involved, but you can't act as though every single person has the exact same experiences that they interpret in the exact same way. Like the vast majority of the time it wouldn't be hard to find someone from that nation who has the exact opposite opinion; like you have to put these experiences and opinions into a broader context if you want them to mean anything.

Like you'll see Western Liberals quote some reactionary Eastern European as proof that communism was evil, which all other context aside still involves ignoring the vast numbers of people from those countries who either actively support communism or consider it better than the current regime. Like I wonder they'd feel if someone used the testimony of a Trump supporter as proof that Biden runs an illegitimate regime based on a stolen election. But then again they'd probably come up with some excuse about how it's not the same; as far as they're concerned political diversity (as with most forms of meaningful individuality) is reserved for citizens of the civilised world

The treatment meted out to Jews in Germany and other European countries is a disgrace to its authors and to modern civilisation; but posterity will not exonerate any country that fails to bear its proper share of the sacrifices needed to alleviate Jewish suffering and distress. To place the brunt of the burden upon Arab Palestine is a miserable evasion of the duty that lies upon the whole of the civilised world. It is also morally outrageous. No code of morals can justify the persecution of one people in an attempt to relieve the persecution of another. The cure for the eviction of Jews from Germany is not to be sought in the eviction of the Arabs from their homeland; and the relief of Jewish distress may not be accomplished at the cost of inflicting a corresponding distress upon an innocent and peaceful population [...] No room can be made in Palestine for a second nation except by dislodging or exterminating the nation in possession.

George Antonius, The Arab Awakening (1938)

In the light of a conversation that I just had with a friend, let me remind you, or perhaps tell you, if you are unaware, that just like the film franchise, the game “Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora” tells about events that had happened in our own history. It’s a story about children being stolen away from their families, stripped away from their cultures and forced to become soldiers that would fight on behalf of their enemies.

Real native children have been known to be taken away from their parents in America, then placed into non-native families and special residential schools to, quote, ""civilise"" them. Real children were forced to give up on everything they held dear, from religion to their own language, and listen to people around them degrade their heritage. Real children were forced to cut their hair, wear European clothes and even give up their NAMES for European ones, and it was totally legal until ICWA (Indian child safety act, among other laws) was established, and for your knowledge it had almost been overturned THIS YEAR.

The point of the game, as it was with the movies, is in part to bring awareness, to let people know that these things happened, that they were horrible, and offer to experience something similar first-hand, however fictional the setting may be.