RUTHFULLY YOURS

First: Farewell to the print Village Voice which had the best columns on jazz of any paper while Nathan “Nat” Irving Hentoff was a columnist from 1958 to 2009.

Second: I am reminded of Nixon’s disgraced vice -president Spiro Agnew’s phrase describing an acrimonious media as ” the nattering nabobs of negativism.” It is claimed that the late columnist William Safire wrote those words for Agnew.

Third: George Orwell’s pithy quote on the media: “The very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. Lies will pass into history.”

Fourth: If a tree falls in the forest and the mainstream media does not report it, did it happen? rsk with apologies to Geroge Berkeley (1710)

The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible. From the Appendix of Nineteen Eighty-Four, by George Orwell, “The Principles of Newspeak.”

Orwell does not delve very deeply into the subject, but one of the shared chief goals of politically correct speech and NEWSPEAK is to literally shrink the epistemology of the mind. It is not merely a matter of “mental habits,” but to mold the preferred stunted mind of totalitarian activists like Antifa.

It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought — that is, a thought diverging from the principles of Ingsoc — should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words. Its vocabulary was so constructed as to give exact and often very subtle expression to every meaning that a Party member could properly wish to express, while excluding all other meanings and also the possibility of arriving at them by indirect methods.

Newspeak was designed not to extend but to diminish the range of thought, and this purpose was indirectly assisted by cutting the choice of words down to a minimum.

Without exaggeration, this is the shrunken state of mind of Antifa and its political allies in the Democratic Party. The new “thoughtcrime” is now to be suspected of harboring alleged sympathies with Nazism and racism, even though the accusers are grossly ignorant of the roots and practices of Nazism and even of “racism” or “whiteness,” and of the etymological roots and meanings of the words, even though there is not a shred of evidence that “racism” or “Nazism” exists in the fabric of a person’s words and actions. But evidence of innocence

Dr. Leonard Peikoff discusses the “mental state” of Nazi Germans and their Brown Shirts in The Ominous Parallels:

“The concept of personal liberties of the individual as opposed to the authority of the state had to disappear; it is not to be reconciled with the principle of the nationalistic Reich,” said Huber to a country which listened, and nodded. “There are no personal liberties of the individual which fall outside of the realm of the state and which must be respected by the state… The constitution of the nationalistic Reich is therefore not based upon a system of inborn and inalienable rights of the individual.”

Peikoff, writing in the chapter “Hitler’s War Against Reason” in The Ominous Parallels, goes far, and long before the appearance of Antifa and the statue-smashing Social Justice Warriors:

The voluntarist worship of mindless action may be designated by the term “activism.” Activism is the form of irrationalism which extols physical action, based on will or instinct or faith, while repudiating the intellect and its products, such as abstractions, theory, programs, philosophy. In a very literal sense, activism is irrationalism – in action. “We approach the realities of the world only in strong emotion and in action,” says Hitler. (p. 52 of the book)

Ayn Rand wrote in 1971:

Kant’s expressly stated purpose was to save the morality of self-abnegation and self-sacrifice. He knew that it could not survive without a mystic base—and what it had to be saved from was reason.“All within the state; nothing outside it,” proclaimed Benito Mussolini.

Imbibing PC speech and writing, and applying it to any and all issues, achieves the same ends as Orwell’s description of NEWSPEAK, one of which it to inculcate unswerving conformity in thought and deed. Not to mention automatic. And thoughtless obedience, and thoughtless action. One is initially dumbfounded by the crass ignorance of those who censor freedom of speech and the right of assembly. Thus it is fruitless to accuse an Antifa thug of practicing what he purportedly and loudly opposes – Fascism, or the suppression of freedom of speech and assembly – when he physically assaults those with whom he opposes. Anyone who disagrees with him is an “enemy.” Argumentation with the street totalitarians is impossible. “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun,” said Mao. Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, the Perons, Mussolini, and other dictators could have said it, just as well. It is doubtful that Antifa thugs have ever heard of Mao’s “Little Red Rule.”

http://www.cnn.com/2017/08/14/us/what-is-antifa-trnd/

The group is known for causing damage to property during protests. In Berkeley, black-clad protesters wearing masks threw Molotov cocktails and smashed windows at the student union center where the Yiannopoulos event was to be held.

Crow, who was involved with Antifa for almost 30 years, said members use violence as a means of self-defense and they believe property destruction does not equate to violence.

“There is a place for violence. Is that the world that we want to live in? No. Is it the world we want to inhabit? No. Is it the world we want to create? No. But will we push back? Yes,” Crow said.

Levin said Antifa activists feel the need to partake in violence because “they believe that elites are controlling the government and the media. So they need to make a statement head-on against the people who they regard as racist.”

“There’s this ‘It’s going down’ mentality and this ‘Hit them with your boots’ mentality that goes back many decades to confrontations that took place, not only here in the American South, but also in places like Europe,” he added.

White nationalists and other members of the so-called alt-right have denounced members of Antifa, sometimes calling them the “alt-left.” Many white nationalists from the Charlottesville rallies claimed it was the Antifa groups that led the protests to turn violent.

Peter Cvjetanovic, a white nationalist who attended the Virginia protests over the weekend, said he believes the far left, including Antifa, are “just as dangerous, if not more dangerous than the right wing could ever be.”

“These are people who preach tolerance and love while at the same time threatening people with a different political ideology. We go to our rallies and they harass us and attack us but they held theirs and we ignore them. You don’t see right-wing protests get like this,” Cvjetanovic told CNN affiliate KRNV.

But Crow said the philosophy of Antifa is based on the idea of direct action. “The idea in Antifa is that we go where they (right-wingers) go. That hate speech is not free speech. That if you are endangering people with what you say and the actions that are behind them, then you do not have the right to do that.

“And so we go to cause conflict, to shut them down where they are, because we don’t believe that Nazis or fascists of any stripe should have a mouthpiece.”

The Neo- Nazis are a loathsome, loutish, hateful group and the President made a dumb statement about “decent people on both sides.”As a result, the media, the left, and the never Trumpsters are out in force. Even many Republican summer soldiers and sunshine patriots are tucking up their petticoats in high dudgeon. So be it.

The right wing groups are amateur bigots- small in number with very limited national influence- none in the academies or the media. The Antifa groups are professional bigots who know how to manipulate and influence the public….and they employ every perceived gripe from every minority to inflame national rhetoric in order to destroy democracy.

The ones that really get my goat are the hypocrites who use Holocaust metaphor and anti-Semitism to denounce the Neo-Nazis. “This is the ideology that killed six-million Jews” screeched a young man recently. Funny, I never heard him denounce Islamic jihad driven genocidal goals. For that matter he supported Obama’s Iran deal which enabled a regime whose open and avowed and averred aim is to destroy Israel and kill six-million Jews. And he thinks that BDS is just an expression of tough love of Israel.

An e-pal J.P. wrote :

“But the bigger issue is the sudden interest in Nazis, when anti-semitism has been on the rise for the last ten years.Why is it that a couple of hundred anti-semites warrants such massive attention from the mainstream press, from the Democrats, and from the left? And from you? Why don’t they (or you) care when millions of college students get together every year for a week-long celebration of anti-semitism? Is the only difference that the college students don’t display the swastika? Or could it possibly be that all the faux-rage is seen as a way of scoring political points against Trump?”

Well said!

rsk

I am never quite sure whether I am really a Southerner. Texas was in the Confederacy, but West Texas is a lot more Albuquerque than Birmingham. I have never felt any sympathy for the Lost Cause. If I were building monuments to figures from that era, I’d choose Frederick Douglass, Thaddeus Stevens, or, if I’m in a mood, John Brown.

Southerners — and some conservative sentimentalists — tell themselves two convenient lies about the Civil War. One is that the Confederate cause was an honorable one, the other is that the war wasn’t really about slavery. Neither of those stands up to very much scrutiny, and the former is mostly false in no small part because the latter is almost entirely false.

There were honorable men fighting on the Southern side, to be sure, and their fight was an honorable one to the extent that risking life and limb on behalf of one’s home and people is generally honorable. General Lee is widely considered to have been an honorable military man, and so was Field Marshal Rommel. But General Lee’s cause was destroying the United States of America to facilitate slavery. The historical record, including practically every Confederate document explaining Southern separation, makes that clear enough. That the abolitionists were imperfect in their commitment to the liberation of the slaves and that there were Southern men of conscience who detested slavery and yet fought on behalf of its preserver does not change any of that. The War Between the States wasn’t about cotton tariffs.

Many of the monuments and statues now being abominated and disassembled were not erected in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War but some years after, often in reaction to such modest advances in the political and social condition of African Americans as the early 20th century produced. Some were nothing short of consecrated shrines to white supremacy erected to Southern political powers in league with such miscreants as the Ku Klux Klan. To the extent that today’s reaction against these monuments is in essence Democrats cleaning up their own mess, there is some justice to it.

But there would have been some justice to it in 1938 or 1964 as well. The current attack on Confederate monuments is only another front in the Left’s endless kulturkampf. The Left is committed to always being on the offense in the culture wars, and, with Donald Trump and his white-resentment politics installed in the White House and Republicans lined up queasily behind him, the choice of going after Confederate totems is clever. It brings out the kooks and the cranks, and some respectable conservatives feel obliged to defend them. Getting Republicans to re-litigate the Civil War is a great victory for the Democrats, who were, after all, on the wrong side of it as a matter of historical fact. Rather than embrace their party’s proudest and finest legacy, Republicans are now trying to explain away President Trump’s insistence that there were some very fine gentlemen among the tiki-Nazis in Charlottesville. President Trump’s schoolboy forensics is here particularly embarrassing. From Abraham Lincoln to Donald Trump: Evolution runs backward for American political parties.

We should not, in any case, accept the fiction that what is transpiring at the moment is a moral crusade rather than political opportunism.

Monuments have a way of being repurposed: Rome is an overwhelmingly Christian city, and its most famous monument is the Colosseum, where Christians were put to death for sport and for political gain. (It was, however, more common for martyrs to meet their fate at the Circus Maximus.) A famous Roman obelisk, originally brought from Egypt by Caligula as a symbol of imperial power, today stands in St. Peter’s Square, crowned by a small reliquary believed to contain fragments of the True Cross. The Roman Catholics might have proceeded in the same way as the Taliban with Buddhist monuments, smashing every relic of their pagan forebears. The Christian world has undergone such paroxysms from time to time: Iconoclasm is puritanism in vandalism.

Make some effort to try to understand the works, you bumpkins

.IT’S HARD TO MISINTERPRET SOMETHING WORSE THAN ART CRITIC TABASH KHAN DOES, IN THIS ARTICLE: Fad Magazine’s What’s Wrong With Art? Conceptual Art Is Complicated.

“So why are people put off by conceptual art? Often it’s because the artist or gallery hasn’t taken any steps to explain the concepts behind the work. Most visitors to galleries would happily make some effort to try to understand the works but are often only provided with a convoluted press release that includes a line about the work speaking for itself — when it clearly doesn’t.

“For these reasons many visitors will often not engage with the works and be snootily labelled by art world insiders as ‘not getting it’.”

In case you haven’t followed the stultifying degeneration of the contemporary art scene, you might not know Conceptual Art has been the Next Big Thing for about 50 years now. In Conceptual Art, the idea is now an “artist” only needs to have an idea. The actual object can be made by someone else, or be an already existing common object put into a new artistic context, or maybe even not be made at all, but only exist as a documented thought. If a new tangible object is produced, it’s likely been farmed out to anonymous technicians who have actual skills. But it’s the name brand artist who takes the credit and the big money. The lack of actual ability and accomplishment is disguised by lots of pseudo-intellectual academic jargon, designed to obscure rather than illuminate.

Writer Tom Wolfe, in his classic take down of the art world, The Painted Word, had these pretenders pegged back in 1975:

“…there, at last, it was! No more realism, no more representation objects, no more lines, colors, forms, and contours, no more pigments, no more brushstrokes. …Art made its final flight, climbed higher and higher in an ever-decreasing tighter-turning spiral until… it disappeared up its own fundamental aperture…”

Khan gives the game away in his article, but does not seem to realize it:

“After all, the godfather of conceptual art, Marcel Duchamp’s concepts weren’t particularly complex. By placing a urinal in a gallery he was questioning how you define what art is, and whether the artist and the setting give weight to an artwork. Philosophical questions which are still relevant today.”

What Marcel Duchamp did-besides probably stealing the credit for his most infamous work from a mentally ill woman artist– was twist art from a vibrant, visceral experience into an ironic elitist assertion. The date of R. Mutt’s toilet in the gallery was 1917. It’s literally been a hundred years, and the establishment art world is all in on simply creating variations on the same old tired shock tactics.

Conceptual superstar Damien Hirst

This is different because it’s a toilet and a dead animal

Khan nails it when he says Duchamp (or whoever it really was) was not complex. Where he gets it so wrong is assuming that words can be used to justify the inadequate offerings of our corrupted cultural institutions.

Khan obviously believes art needs an enlightened priest caste to transmogrify and translate art for the ignorant peasants. It’s an arrogant assumption very prevalent inside the art world bubble. The Postmodern creative class blames the audience instead of looking at their own failures to communicate and connect.

Art does have a philosophical element to it-but it is so much more than that. And words can never act as a substitute for a visual experience which moves and inspires. Ultimately art is a mysterious, timeless expression that cannot be reduced to language. If we could say it, we wouldn’t have to show it to you.

The art world rebels the Stuckists know the truth. At the core of their principled stand for an art of the people, by the people, for the people, they state a truth we can hold to be self evident:

“Art that has to be in a gallery to be art isn’t art.”

-The Stuckist Manifesto

VACATION UNTIL AUGUST 16TH

Aug 6, 1945 – Aug 9, 1945
During the final stage of World War II, the United States dropped nuclear weapons on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9, 1945, respectively.
Thus began the end of World War 11…..rsk

The American and British media have been inundated lately with denunciations of “illiberalism.” That word was once used to describe a private shortcoming such as a person who was narrow-minded or ungenerous. But in the wake of Donald Trump’s election and Britain’s vote to leave the European Union, “illiberalism” is being treated as a key political concept. In the writings of Fareed Zakaria, David Brooks, James Kirchick, the Economist and the Atlantic, among others, it is now assumed that the line dividing “liberal” from “illiberal” is the most important in politics.

Who are these “illiberals” everyone is talking about? Respected analysts have ascribed illiberalism to the Nazis and the Soviets; to Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping and Kim Jong Un ; to Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Abdel Fattah Al Sisi ; to the Shiite regime in Iran and the military regime in Myanmar; to the democratic governments of India, Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic; to Donald Trump, Theresa May and Brexit; to the nationalist parties in Scotland and Catalonia; to Marine Le Pen, Bernie Sanders, Jeremy Corbyn and the lefty activists demanding political correctness on campus; to Venezuela, Pakistan, Kenya and Thailand.

Not everyone raising the hue and cry about illiberalism has exactly this same list in mind. But the talk follows a consistent pattern: A given commentator will name some violent, repressive regimes (Iran, North Korea, Russia). Then he will explain that their “illiberalism” is reminiscent of various nonviolent, democratically chosen public figures or policies (Mr. Trump, Brexit, Polish immigration rules) that he happens to oppose.

At first glance, it looks like taint by association. If you hate Mr. Trump or Brexit enough, you may be in the market for a way to delegitimize their supporters, 40% or 50% of the voting public. Making it out as though Mr. Trump is a kind of Putin, Erdogan or Kim Jong Un—not Hitler exactly, but at least Hitler lite—may feel like progress.
The catchall label has been applied to Theresa May, Bernie Sanders, Vladimir Putin, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Donald Trump and Xi Jinping

But that isn’t enough of an explanation. A battalion of our best-known journalists and intellectuals are straining to persuade readers that there exists some real-world phenomenon called “illiberalism,” and that it is, moreover, a grave threat. This isn’t routine political partisanship. They really feel as if they are living through a nightmare in which battling “illiberalism” has taken on a staggering significance.

It’s vital to understand this phenomenon, not because “illiberalism” really identifies a coherent idea—it doesn’t—but because the new politics these writers are urging, the politics of liberalism vs. illiberalism, is itself an important, troubling development.

Start with the exaggerated sense of power many Americans and Europeans experienced after the Berlin Wall fell in 1989. Anything seemed possible, and a remarkable number of normally tough-minded people began telling one another fanciful stories about what would happen next. A series of American presidents giddily described the prosperity and goodwill that were about to arise.

George H.W. Bush declared in 1990 that after 100 generations of searching for peace, a new world order was about to be born, “a world quite different from the one we’ve known, a world where the rule of law supplants the rule of the jungle.” Utopian political tracts by Francis Fukuyama (“The End of History and the Last Man,” 1992), Thomas Friedman (“The Lexus and the Olive Tree,” 1999), and Shimon Peres (“The New Middle East,” 1993), described the imminent arrival of the universal rule of law, human rights, individual liberties, free markets and open borders. These speeches and books raised expectations into the stratosphere, asserting that decent men and women everywhere would embrace the liberal order, since the alternatives had been discredited.

Even at the height of all this, one caveat was consistently repeated: A rogue’s gallery of holdouts would continue to resist until the mopping-up operations were complete. Mr. Fukuyama referred to these irrationalists, clinging to nationalism, tribalism and religion, as “megalothymic.” It wasn’t a very catchy brand name. The term that stuck instead came from “The Rise of Illiberal Democracy,” an insightful 1997 essay in Foreign Affairs by Mr. Zakaria, which argued that resistance to the new order was far more widespread than had been recognized.

In this context, “liberalism” was understood as the belief that it was possible and desirable to establish a world-wide regime of law, enforced by American power, to ensure human rights and individual liberties. “Illiberalism” became a catchall term that lumped together anyone opposed to the project—as Marxists used the word “reactionary” to describe anyone opposed to the coming communist world order.