--- In cia-drugs@yahoogroups.com, Bob <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Thanks Bob. The excerpt below is the theory that caught my attention for quite some time now. I somehow "feel" strong emotional resistance, although I have to admit, that during my times in university, I often asked myself if the diverse left-wing groups and their respective leaders, did not offer, at least over here the easy way out of the German dilemma. After all the socialists had fought the Nazis, and many of them wound up in jail. So one could feel part of the former resistance, in times when it wasn't too dangerous anymore. Many of them felt like stone-age socialists though, with their respective bibles. Herder brings us back into the Enlightenment vs Romantics debate, which reminds me of a private exchange with Bakednedeisen a/k/a Ian. (the dangerously irrational roots of Surrealism) And straight into the "Art and/as Religion" roots. But the dominance of art is what Irving (?) Kristol in his essay "Counterculture" [once on AEI, but gone by now, it seems], considers the ultimate evil of the counterculture. Probably for economical reasons, since only the select few make money with it. The rest is a problem for society. Hmm? Where to start, with Matthew Lasar's book. Pacifica is at the center of the US counterculture, no doubt. -b http://www.change-links.org/Storming.html Storming Pacifica: Revising my view of Pacifica History Clare Spark, Ph.D., former Program Director, KPFK (2-81-8-82) Draft, July 22, 1999 ... Reading the rhetoric dispensed by the tireless and dedicated protesters, one would think that we are witnessing a revitalized democratic social movement. No one, to my knowledge, has pointed out that the intellectual assumptions that have governed public broadcasting, the counter-culture, much of the New Left, and Left-wing academia alike, especially since the late 1960s, are part of the legacy of the European Far Right. Sadly, the Pacifica dissidents share the same discourse as the managers they deplore. I refer to multiculturalism, a.k.a. cultural relativism as promulgated by the Populist-Progressive movement of conservative reform that reacted to the liberal, proto-socialist nineteenth century. "Cultural diversity" as promulgated by today's "progressive" Left signifies the völkisch or "communitarian" or primitivist inheritance of J.G. Von Herder and German Romanticism generally, the blood-and-soil ideology that attempted to roll back the Scientific Revolution and its offspring: the Enlightenment, the rise of the secular state, individual civil rights (equality before the law), "careers open to the talents," and popular sovereignty, creations of radical liberals. These rejected libertarian ideals were associated with "rootless cosmopolitans" as their rooted enemies called them. The rooted cosmopolitans, like fascist ideologues of the 1930s, wrote "history" as the struggle between Good and Evil. Their obsessive interest was in "social cohesion" and "equilibrium." Money/"bourgeois society"/(later, the Bomb) was the root of all social and environmental disintegration or "disruption"; by contrast, the good King of the High Middle Ages held "the (local) community" and Nature together in the Great Chain of Being. As multiculturalists, the rooted cosmopolitans emphasize "inclusion" and "identity" conceived in the same static terms as medievalists and Renaissance humanists defending hierarchy and order against the incursions of science and other democratizing forces such as mass literacy. Rootless cosmopolitans, it was argued, not only had no identities themselves, they were the creators of mob society as their insidious materialist doctrines separated ordinary people from their families of origin, breaking what Edmund Burke would call narrative continuity with the (idealized, orderly) past. ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> Fair play? Video games influencing politics. Click and talk back! http://us.click.yahoo.com/VpgUKB/pzNLAA/cUmLAA/vseplB/TM --------------------------------------------------------------------~-> Complete archives at http://www.sitbot.net/ Please let us stay on topic and be civil. OM Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/cia-drugs/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
