Saturday, September 02, 2006
New paradygms
Traditionally, some people, posing as modern and thinking they’re following the right path of history, used to oppose reaction against revolution, and accordingly labelled their opponents as reactionary. The reaction and its agents represented then the side of history that was being defeated, so said the progressive wisdom. While some of their goals were easily uncovered as impossible – something in the line of ‘Marxism: great theory, wrong species’ – and others as lame excuses for imposing tyrannies surpassing anything previously seen in modern times – we just have to remember that twentieth century greatest murderers weren’t the Nazis, as despicable and racist was their regime, but the communist/socialist ideology, and its agents: Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot or Kim Il Sung – some other goals were quite reasonable, feasible, and why not, just. Those were slowly put in place by the very same regimes that those progressives fought.
This successful struggle had, and still has, several important consequences for the victorious left: first, and most important, it gave them a virtual double personality. The utopia isn’t for this world; once our dreams are fulfilled we need something else. The left intelligentsia rules all western cultural institutions and most political ones. It pervades the mass media, the arts, and drains its power from this domination. But this domination means that they’re no longer revolutionary. Revolution is never main stream.
Many political analysts associate left’s orphanage with the demise of the Soviet Union. I don’t completely agree with them. While this may be true for some, especially in Europe, I think that left’s ‘orphan’ status is mainly from their lack of real goals, and the sorrow for their revolutionary status. Because today, as always, those who hold the levers of power are the reaction, certainly never the revolution.
This successful struggle had, and still has, several important consequences for the victorious left: first, and most important, it gave them a virtual double personality. The utopia isn’t for this world; once our dreams are fulfilled we need something else. The left intelligentsia rules all western cultural institutions and most political ones. It pervades the mass media, the arts, and drains its power from this domination. But this domination means that they’re no longer revolutionary. Revolution is never main stream.
Many political analysts associate left’s orphanage with the demise of the Soviet Union. I don’t completely agree with them. While this may be true for some, especially in Europe, I think that left’s ‘orphan’ status is mainly from their lack of real goals, and the sorrow for their revolutionary status. Because today, as always, those who hold the levers of power are the reaction, certainly never the revolution.
# posted by Pedro Oliveira @ 10:36 PM 
