StephenKMackSD's Blog

Never fear it is perpetually 1952 at The Beast! And the political weather is always turbulent. There is my consistent  favorite, Mr. Weiss, to do the heavy lifting, handling the weighty matter of Robert Conquest’s obituary, stoking the New Cold War fires with Old Cold War Nostalgia, it was a bravura performance. But Mr. Nimmo has the pedestrian task of a bit of bashing both of Corbyn and Putin. Tony Blair’s political hysterics at the Guardian and the unstinting political screeching at The Financial Times hasn’t phased Mr. Nemmo, as the front rank of Corbyn as Satan propganda.

The fact that Putin is a religious and political conservative doesn’t interfere with the main thesis of the essay that RT is the font of Corbyn Apologetics. Putin is in editorial control of RT, recall it is 1952, and dictators keep their media outlets under strict ideological control. What might this unregenerate Leftist have in common with the very Conservative Mr. Putin? To drive a political wedge in Britain as part of his Master Plan to defeat ‘Western Hegemony’? We are deep in McCarthy/Nixon territory.

Given this, how does one explain the Judith Miller Scooter Libby alliance? to bring the discussion back to American ground. The New York Times is without doubt an outlet for American propaganda, and this is simply one instance of that glaring reality.But again, we are anchored in 1952, at the height of The Cold War and those kinds of questions constitute an ideological deviation that will be severely punished. Most likely in the pages of The Daily Beast, with Mr. Nimmo acting as inquisitor, recall that McCarthy/Nixon tradition.

Political Observer

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/08/17/how-putin-is-meddling-in-england-s-elections.html

The obituary of Mr. Conquest is the perfect opportunity for Old Cold War Nostalgia that dovetails quite nicely with the New Cold War and Putin as the New Stalin! No surprise here! The crimes of Stalin and his western apologists on the Left are well documented, yet that self-imposed ideologically driven blindness wasn’t really broken until the publication of The Gulag Archipelago in the West in 1973. The Nouveaux Philosophes of Bernard-Henri Levy and his Barbarism with a Human Face are the political issues of that publication. The Left can’t be absolved of that willful ignorance fueled by ideological lock step. But even the Neo-Cons like Irving Kristol were guilty of that same crime, as were many others, in their radical youth.
On the question of literary criticism, one wonders where Mr. Conquest was, when one of the greatest practitioners of that art was V.S. Pritchett, or were his politics of the wrong school? His Complete Collected Essays prove his staying power as critic and stylist.
Mr. Michael Weiss attempted an obituary at The Daily Beast, that didn’t quite have the polish and depth that this essay demonstrates: Oxbridgers demonstrate that polish and literary sophistication, with a kind of confident ease, that only money and status can buy!
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/08/06/robert-conquest-the-man…

American Littérateur

The Neo-Liberal Consensus is not just fissuring before our eyes, due to it’s abject failure to deliver on it’s ersatz utopianism, based on the fiction of the self-correcting Market and other self-serving fictions: those fictions can no longer hold, in the face of the seventh year of the economic doldrums, of it’s watershed.  First we had the essay by Tony Blair full of the same panic and hysterics, heavily garnished with self-congratulation of the political adept,a Neo-Thatcherite, with this surprising claim :

We forced change on the Tories.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/aug/12/even-if-hate-me-dont-take-labour-over-cliff-edge-tony-blair

Compare Mr. Blair’s assertion to a claim made by  Mrs. Thatcher:

‘“Our greatest achievement was Tony Blair. We forced our opponents to change.”

http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2015/08/owen-jones-right-are-mocking-jeremy-corbyn-because-secretly-they-fear-him

And now we have Mr. Baldwin in full panic mode, as the thoroughly colonized New Labor is presented as a Centrist alternative to the ‘Radical Leftists’ like Mr. Corbyn. The proclamation: we  are the sane ones, the electable ones, in answer to the ‘Populism’ of Mr. Farage and to look outside our own political parochialism, for a moment to Europe , Syriza Podemos and their ally the radical,unelectable political nihilist Mr. Corbyn.

As he defies decades of history — from the collapse of the Berlin Wall to the rise of a global economy and the financial crash — Mr Corbyn has as much in common with the shallow populism of Nigel Farage and Donald Trump as he does with Syriza and Podemos. But in one regard the Corbyn campaign has been more adept and modern than that of any recent Labour politician: he seems genuinely to want people to engage with politics again.

In the thrall of his panic Mr. Baldwin repeats the foreshortened Neo-Liberal rationalist history of the post-war, yet eliding from his potted history the total abject failure of the Neo-Liberal theory and practice of ‘government’ -recall the Reagan’s notorious catch-phrase of ‘government is the problem’? Also recall Mrs. Thatcher’s penchant for passing out copies of Hayek’s Road to Serfdom.

Political Reporter

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/24639070-41cc-11e5-b98b-87c7270955cf.html#ft-article-comments

The Poles have a history of a pose of independence, this from the Economist of November 30, 2011, with the headline of : ‘Sikorski: hero or traitor? Backwash from Berlin’

What of reaction elsewhere? Readers may be surprised to hear that Poland’s main opposition parties think Mr Sikorski’s stance is tantamount to treason. He faces a no-confidence vote in parliament, and the main opposition leader, Jarosław Kaczyński, wants him brought before the state tribunal (a kind of impeachment) for breaking his constitutional oath: a federal Europe, he argues [link in Polish], would bring Poland back to the colonial status it suffered before 1989. Joachim Brudziński, an MP from Mr Kaczyński’s party, said Mr Sikorski was advocating a “Fourth Reich and German hegemony”.

http://www.economist.com/blogs/easternapproaches/2011/11/sikorski-hero-or-traitor

Or Mr. Sikorski’s other provocative exercise of political candor, in The Economist of June 23, 2014 titled ‘Sikorski in hot water’:

More illegal recordings are destabilising the Polish government this week. The juiciest revelation so far is that the foreign minister, Radek Sikorski  said in January that he viewed Poland’s alliance with America as “worthless”.

Mr Sikorski’s comments were made in a dinner conversation with the former finance minister, Jacek Rostowski, which was illegally recorded and printed in Wprost, a Polish news weekly. During the often vulgar conversation, Mr Sikorski said the alliance with Washington “is complete bullshit. We’ll get into a conflict with the Germans and the Russians and we’ll think that everything is super because we gave the Americans a blowjob. Losers. Complete losers.”

http://www.economist.com/blogs/easternapproaches/2014/06/polish-politics-0

Or further news on political fate of Mr. and Mrs. Sikorski, titled ‘Radexit and Appoplexit – Radoslaw Sikorski and Anne Applebaum Are Booted out of Poland’:

http://russia-insider.com/en/politics/radexit-and-appoplexit-radoslaw-sikorski-and-anne-applebaum-are-booted-out-poland/ri8887

Those Poles can be prickley political allies, but some of them are like Andrzej Duda firm believers in The New Cold War and the myth of Russian revanchism: the political strategy and Party Line  as exercised in Ukraine by American political operatives like Victoria Nuland and Amb. Pyatt allied with NGO’s like The Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, Radio Liberty, Radio Free Europe etc., eliding from the political conversation the participation of Right Sector and Svoboda as partners in the Coup.

In deference to American power it is essential that Mr. Duda remind the US that it is advisable that a ‘buffer state’ be  awarded due deference, while denying it’s status as a ‘buffer state’ to the American hegemon. The whole question is about saving face and obtaining that expanded American base.

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/d6749156-410e-11e5-b98b-87c7270955cf.html#axzz3iim1b9h4

Political Reporter

Where else but breitbart.com, named after the craven political opportunist Andrew, comes this story, in all it’s white hysterical glory, that the historical inevitability of the revival of The Black Panther Party has happened! The model offered by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale was politically fated, to engage in political metaphysics. The New American Civil War has been quietly raging for some time, but the fact of armed black women and men, fed up with eating shit from racist police marks a new stage in that Civil War.

http://www.breitbart.com/texas/2015/08/12/armed-black-panthers-march-in-waller-count-texas-oink-oink-bang-bang/

The picture of those gun toting ‘conservatives’, white people meeting an army of angry,armed black folks appeals to the Neo-Confederate/Originalist wet dream of a Race War. Who will be their Robert E. Lee? Scalia’s already borderline blood pressure must have risen appreciably- one can only imagine the breakfast table histrionics!

Political Observer

I have reached the point of complete exasperation with the self-proclaimed technocrats, the ones that Lippmann celebrated as the guardians against too much democracy, who have been not just wrong, but catastrophically wrong, on almost every ‘policy question’ since 2000 or even before, Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran and the collection of utter failures in between. Or on the question of our benighted ‘ally’ Israel! The jackbooted thug Netanyahu pronounces himself the spokesman for world Jewry. How credible is that? Think of that Paris synagogue where the congregation spontaneously sang La Marseillaise in answer to his assertion that Israel was the only safe place for Jews.   And the burning question as to who is an Anti-Semite: those who don’t kowtow to this current political orthodoxy are guilty, prima facie!
One is reminded of the gossipy yet insightful histories that are collected in The Georgetown Set, and other books like Joe Alsop’s Cold War, Kennan and the Art of Foreign Policy, The Color of Truth. Of Perry Anderson’s American Foreign Policy and Its Thinkers in the New Left Review of September/October 2013 and of the Fall 2013 issue of  Cold War Studies forum on George F. Kennan and the questions that the John Gaddis biography raised.
Do not forgive me for lashing out at your patent moral/ethical bankruptcy, your continuing exercise of bad judgement  and self-aggrandizing self-exculpatory chatter of ‘now I have it right’! Too little too late! You are deserving of not just my paltry exercise of scorn, but of closing up shop as reliable commentators on anything other than the weather, and the condition of your outsize egos!

StephenKMackSD

Ms. Tett begins her review of PostCapitalism: A Guide to our Future, by Paul Mason with some interesting observations on Wikipedia, but it isn’t long before the usual Financial Times’ Anti-Left Hysterics becomes primary, not anything like a surprise. But notice that the Financial Times was/is a defender of Neo-Liberal Utopianism, while Ms Tett exercises the right to criticize the Left Utopianism of Mr. Mason, in the unflattering light of rhetorical shrillness, among other crimes of literary/political decorum. Could the double standard be more obvious?

What is interesting to me, as an American, is the idea that Post-Capitalism elides from the conversation the reality, that with the utter failure of the Neo-Liberal idea/practice and the failure of Austerity, followed by the present economic stagnation is to be succeeded by  Corporatism: the passage of the TPA and it’s successor the TPP are the secret laws that inaugurate that regime, that replaces the ideas and practices of republican rule i.e. the eclipse of popular sovereignty and the rule of indigenous law making,  and the rise of corporate NGO’s as the final arbiters of  how we might live, in a political world remade in the image and practice of a demonstrably failed Capital. Not to speak of the conformity and predations of America’s bought and paid for political class. And the fact that Obama had to appeal to the arch-reactionary Republican Party, to pass this travesty, indeed this utter betrayal of our political tradition, makes a mockery of his original public relations gambit of ‘Hope and Change’.

Perhaps the Post-Capitalism of Mr. Mason might be the successor to the Corporatism that looms in the future of America, but how long must we wait for the myth of the self -correcting Market to become a reality? Or should we discard this along with the collection of Political Romantics that dubbed themselves Economists: Hayek, von Mises, Friedman or script writer and Prophet of Greed Ayn Rand.

Almost Marx

If there is a successor to Edward Said, it is without doubt Pankaj Mishra. For proof  of this claim read his essay titled ‘The Sound of Cracking’, a review of two books cited below, in the August 27, 2015 edition of The London Review of Books (Behind a pay wall or purchase it at the Kindle Store)

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v37/n16/pankaj-mishra/the-sound-of-cracking

For a challenging and insightful essay on Hayek see John Grey’s essay here:

http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2015/07/john-gray-friedrich-hayek-i-knew-and-what-he-got-right-and-wrong

For a more complete examination of Hayek as thinker,writer,economist see this issue of Critical Review titled Hayek:The Good, The Bad,The Ugly.

http://www.criticalreview.com/crf/current_issue25_34.html

Political Observer

Mr. Weiss turns that ever useful Straussian device of packing an essay full to the brim with the argumentatively useful and the tangential, in equal measure, or even what might be politically useful information, to the business of obfuscation rather than clarification. Although Mr. Weiss is probably a third or fourth hand practitioner of that strategy. Could he have been a student of Harvey Mansfield?  Except that in the literary reminiscence that rambling collection of associations is the essence of such a tribute. Not to forget that  Mr. Weiss is well connected in the world of letters as well as politics: Conquest and Hitchens were his associates. And Henry Jackson and Thatcher were his teachers/masters: the congruence of Neo-Cons and Neo-Liberals defines the dismal political present, that also defines Mr. Weiss’ politics. The Old Cold War and the New Cold War have one commonality the Soviet Union/Russia: how convenient a starting point for the essay than the death of Mr. Conquest as an opportunity to revive those ghosts of the Old Cold War as a useful backdrop to the New Cold War?

Political Observer

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/08/06/robert-conquest-the-man-who-unearthed-the-big-soviet-lie.html