It is so very clear and rational to anybody who is not an oppressor
Coming back from work yesterday, at the subway platform I noticed an advertisement poster for the musical "Hair", with the tagline "Now more than ever". So very true, just not in the sense that the producers probably mean.
When I was a kid, our local library still had one copy of "The Little Red Book of Schoolchildren". I was initially puzzled by the fact the cover of this book was blue, since being just a kid, I wasn't quite aware of the whole story. Suffice to say with my present-day knowledge that this book had been popular ten years earlier and was a small part of the general stalinist attempt to destroy the Western economies. One part of this plan must have been ruining the schools and this way make the Soviet military and economic conquest easier a few decades later.
The book provided schoolchildren practical instructions how to ruin the school and prevent learning. Of course, these weren't the stated goals, which were about having fun, but they were the real goals of such advice as taking away the teacher's right to unilaterally punish misbehaving students. We can see the results of many of these suggestions in the present-day schools, since the stalinist intellectuals were raised on this advice and they have been continuously working to ruin the society, still bitter that the Soviets lost and the West won.
One of the suggestions in this book that I still recall was to suggest to your parents that perhaps it is not a good idea to buy all kinds of expensive stuff just to yourself, but for communal use. Another suggestion was to ask your music teacher to talk about the musical "Hair" instead of boring classical music. When you think about this a little, you can see the shameless dishonesty of stalinists: do you think that the Soviet Union ever allowed "Hair" to be performed inside its borders? Remember that this was a nation whose official policy was that even American jazz music was morally corrupting. So if the stalinists obviously didn't think that seeing "Hair" would be good for people and that it would give them good ideas, what possible motivation could they have had for pushing it to Western schoolchildren?
It is very revealing to see what other ideas the stalinists pushed for the West that they would have never ever tolerated for a second in countries where they had the absolute power. The peace movement, opposition of nuclear energy, feminism, gay rights, postmodernism, cultural relativism: none of these were tolerated a slightest bit in the Soviet Union, since all these were originally goals meant to weaken the Western society and economy and pave the way for Soviet takeover. The useful idiots in the West developed them further and advocated them in all seriousness, and the various front organizations of Soviets cynically helped them. I can only imagine how much some Soviet mole despised the idealistic hippies whose ideas he had to support and pretend to like. Oh well, things will be very different after the revolution comes.
I once entertained an idea about some secret skunk works think tank in 1950's Russia, consisting of creative young writers, artists, futurologists and social scientists gathered from all around the nation. The purpose of this group would have been to develop ideas that can then be spread to West to gradually weaken it. I can vividly imagine how this group, aided with copious amounts of coffee, vodka and cigarettes, brainstormed all kinds of ideas. I don't find it at all difficult to imagine that the whole Second Wave feminism and postmodernism movements were at least roughly sketched by this group, perhaps as an inside semi-joke of the group.
After enough vodka had been consumed, maybe the group started to parody itself and compete who can come up with the most absurd idea that would be so howlingly funny if it really became mainstream. Heck, perhaps the succinct term "homophobe" or "heteronormative" won at the time. (How many decades would you need to go back for these term to not even exist or make any sense at all?) Then, due to some bureaucratic mistake, the stern-faced party officials who didn't understand humour or satire took the results of this competition and gave their agents the task of seeding them, and the members of the think tank didn't dare to confess the truth and stop this. Later, when this think tank had been disbanded a long time ago, its surviving members had to watch the ideological progress of the coming decades in absurd disbelief. Perhaps even right now, in some small apartment in Moscow or some distant farm deep in Russia, there is some old guy who chuckles a little when he reads news about the gay marriage debate and the demands that people who don't like gays need psychiatric treatment.
Come to think of it, this would make a great running joke in some episode of "American Dad" or "Family Guy". Each time the daughter in "American Dad" or some guest character in "Family Guy" expresses some vapid progressive idea such as complaining about "heteronormativity" or saying that as a feminist, she doesn't feel comfortable in criticizing other cultures or calling them sexist, this would be immediately followed by a flashback to some member of this think tank proposing that very idea. The other members first listen to it wide-eyed, then suddenly realize it and its meaning, and laugh drunkenly and say that there is no way that the West could ever fall for it! I can already imagine this scene and how all the characters would look life drawn and animated "Family Guy" style.
When I was a kid, our local library still had one copy of "The Little Red Book of Schoolchildren". I was initially puzzled by the fact the cover of this book was blue, since being just a kid, I wasn't quite aware of the whole story. Suffice to say with my present-day knowledge that this book had been popular ten years earlier and was a small part of the general stalinist attempt to destroy the Western economies. One part of this plan must have been ruining the schools and this way make the Soviet military and economic conquest easier a few decades later.
The book provided schoolchildren practical instructions how to ruin the school and prevent learning. Of course, these weren't the stated goals, which were about having fun, but they were the real goals of such advice as taking away the teacher's right to unilaterally punish misbehaving students. We can see the results of many of these suggestions in the present-day schools, since the stalinist intellectuals were raised on this advice and they have been continuously working to ruin the society, still bitter that the Soviets lost and the West won.
One of the suggestions in this book that I still recall was to suggest to your parents that perhaps it is not a good idea to buy all kinds of expensive stuff just to yourself, but for communal use. Another suggestion was to ask your music teacher to talk about the musical "Hair" instead of boring classical music. When you think about this a little, you can see the shameless dishonesty of stalinists: do you think that the Soviet Union ever allowed "Hair" to be performed inside its borders? Remember that this was a nation whose official policy was that even American jazz music was morally corrupting. So if the stalinists obviously didn't think that seeing "Hair" would be good for people and that it would give them good ideas, what possible motivation could they have had for pushing it to Western schoolchildren?
It is very revealing to see what other ideas the stalinists pushed for the West that they would have never ever tolerated for a second in countries where they had the absolute power. The peace movement, opposition of nuclear energy, feminism, gay rights, postmodernism, cultural relativism: none of these were tolerated a slightest bit in the Soviet Union, since all these were originally goals meant to weaken the Western society and economy and pave the way for Soviet takeover. The useful idiots in the West developed them further and advocated them in all seriousness, and the various front organizations of Soviets cynically helped them. I can only imagine how much some Soviet mole despised the idealistic hippies whose ideas he had to support and pretend to like. Oh well, things will be very different after the revolution comes.
I once entertained an idea about some secret skunk works think tank in 1950's Russia, consisting of creative young writers, artists, futurologists and social scientists gathered from all around the nation. The purpose of this group would have been to develop ideas that can then be spread to West to gradually weaken it. I can vividly imagine how this group, aided with copious amounts of coffee, vodka and cigarettes, brainstormed all kinds of ideas. I don't find it at all difficult to imagine that the whole Second Wave feminism and postmodernism movements were at least roughly sketched by this group, perhaps as an inside semi-joke of the group.
After enough vodka had been consumed, maybe the group started to parody itself and compete who can come up with the most absurd idea that would be so howlingly funny if it really became mainstream. Heck, perhaps the succinct term "homophobe" or "heteronormative" won at the time. (How many decades would you need to go back for these term to not even exist or make any sense at all?) Then, due to some bureaucratic mistake, the stern-faced party officials who didn't understand humour or satire took the results of this competition and gave their agents the task of seeding them, and the members of the think tank didn't dare to confess the truth and stop this. Later, when this think tank had been disbanded a long time ago, its surviving members had to watch the ideological progress of the coming decades in absurd disbelief. Perhaps even right now, in some small apartment in Moscow or some distant farm deep in Russia, there is some old guy who chuckles a little when he reads news about the gay marriage debate and the demands that people who don't like gays need psychiatric treatment.
Come to think of it, this would make a great running joke in some episode of "American Dad" or "Family Guy". Each time the daughter in "American Dad" or some guest character in "Family Guy" expresses some vapid progressive idea such as complaining about "heteronormativity" or saying that as a feminist, she doesn't feel comfortable in criticizing other cultures or calling them sexist, this would be immediately followed by a flashback to some member of this think tank proposing that very idea. The other members first listen to it wide-eyed, then suddenly realize it and its meaning, and laugh drunkenly and say that there is no way that the West could ever fall for it! I can already imagine this scene and how all the characters would look life drawn and animated "Family Guy" style.
There was a British series called "Signs and Wonders" that suggested that that postmodernism was cooked up by the CIA along with ex-Nazi de Man types to neutralize leftist intellectuals.
Posted by Anonymous | 1:55 AM