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Originally comment on shared post:

"Never thought that reading 50-year-old book reviews (without knowing it) would make me so happy over morning coffee."

[link to article]

If civilization is wiped out in a nuclear war between East and West, it is quite likely that Hegel will be among the few authors to survive the holocaust. His writings are currently being studied in places as far apart as Ghana and Cuba. He is part of the curriculum in Samarkand, and Mao Tse-tung has seen to it that Chinese schoolboys are imbued with a proper respect for the official philosopher of Prussian conservatism. There are bearded sages in Central Asia for whom he has taken the place of Aristotle (the only other philosopher to have come to their notice). Africans who study in Paris cannot fail to return with potted fragments of Hegel in their mental baggage, though they may think of themselves as followers of Marx or Sartre. All in all, Hegel has made good. The only considerable area of contemporary civilization where he remains taboo is the Anglo-American academic world.

The appearance of a critical commentary on Hegel by Professor Walter Kaufmann provides a welcome opportunity for examining some of the reasons for this cultural lag. The most important of them is obvious. As Sidney Hook observed in a recent Encounter article, the Anglo-American school of philosophy has been hard at work since the First World War trying to make people forget its own previous indebtedness to Hegel.

(emphasis mine)

The Skullist Concept of Class

The number of Skullists that we ultimately identified was very small. The list of names is short. This is principally because to be a Skullist was not simply to be an admirer of Skullism, or to wish to be Skullist. It also meant having the opportunity and means able to practice Skullism a criterion which greatly limits the number of potential individuals to a very small subset of the elite. Having great wealth helps a lot, but it is not sufficient. More important is the idea of class.

It is important to emphasize Skullism is very much about the old idea of class, a notion that was also once quite prevalent in the psyche of most Americans, very heavily in the 1930s and dominant until at least the 1940s, but which since ebbed away and has largely been exorcised from the collective view of society.

This nearly complete disappearance of the notion of class from the American collective social self-consciousness is precisely one of the great assets of the Skullists, in that it has allowed them to become effectively dominant within American society while, as T. and I used to say, hiding in plain sight.

The idea in this day and age that such a group of "elite-thinking" people could be so snobbily class-conscious strikes modern Americans as somehow rude---a violation of an assumed universal social compact of Pop Culture egalitarianism.

The vague idea that taken hold is that yes, the rich are an indeed an oppressive and greedy class, and they pursue their own screwed-up interests, but to use the terminology of a Jazz Age artist, the rich are actually not much different than you and I.

Their motivations are mostly like our own types of greed, lust and pettiness, but on a much larger scale. They are ultimately as chaotic and shortsighted in their mode of living as ordinary citizens who live paycheck to paycheck and hope that someday life will be different.

Most important of all to the success of Skullism has been the cultivation of the Postmodern idea that there is no longer any significant distinction between old money and new money.

A quick illustration of how the true principle of class used to function within American society can be found in the history of the American diplomatic corps, and specifically of the ambassadorships. Until recent decades, there has arguably been no greater preserve of the old moneyed elite than this group.

In former times, as a matter of pure necessity, this collection of public servants would have been necessarily drawn from the set of Americans who were comfortable moving in foreign cultures with some form of ease. They had to be cosmopolitan enough of mind and habit to represent the nation among the nobility who have historically represented the nations of the Old World.

More so than any other branch of the government, these public servants would largely have come from the elite of the Northeast and especially graduates of the elite boarding schools and the Ivy League. They would have been the well-connected, well-heeled sort of people who are comfortable commanding a staff of servants. They would have spent their youth abroad at times, and become accustomed to behaving properly while interacting with the upper class of Europe and other continents. That is, they would have given America a semblance of "class" in a roles where such things were not optional but mandatory.

In the era when Americans still understood this idea,  all Americans any class would probably have agreed that these people were exactly the ones all of us would have wanted representing the nation among the crowned heads of Britain and the continent.

It is the kind of dignified public role that only certain people are bred to do. Others, no matter how wealthy they have become, simply cannot fill this kind of role. They retain a vulgarity of mind and habit that only serves to discredit America in the eyes of the rest of the world. The egalitarian notion that people of all backgrounds are capable of filling these types of roles can only lead to disaster.

At least, that is how a Skullist would probably think about it.

Skullism

[continued from here]

Through our long investigation of the Skullists, T. and I came to develop a fascination for what we came to call Skullism, which can be defined, at least for the time being, as the collective philosophy of action, and the practical implementation thereof, towards achieving certain worldly goals, namely power over other men on a large scale to the levels of nations, ultimately to the point of having the power of life and death over as many other human beings as possible.

Any study of history will quickly discover that such individuals have apparently existed since the dawn of recorded history, and certainly before that as well, if the archaeological record can interpreted in the traditional way. In fact, the impulse to have such power of other people strikes most sane modern individuals as extremely primitive, and associated in particular with prehistoric cultures and among native tribes of recent times, and the ones that still live today as if in the Paleolithic Era. The prevalence of skull veneration among such primitive cultures is well attested.

But when T. and I spoke of the Skullists, we knew that we always implied individuals from recent history,  particular from the mid-Nineteenth Century onward, but not infrequently earlier than that, especially when tracing the lineage of earlier forms of Skullism throughout history.

Somehow though, the list of names that we gathered, that we both could incontrovertibly agree were Skullists (and we never disagreed [1]), were individuals who seemed to flourish from around the year 1830 onward. The people we became most fascinated with were ones from the mid-Twentieth Century onward.

It was clear in our mind that Skullism as we had chosen to define it and examine it, was somehow a manifestation of the modern world itself, the civilization created by the scientific and industrial revolutions.

We were both struck by the irony that such a situation could come about, given hat modernity (and especially the Twentieth Century) has not infrequently been painted in history as synonymous with the notion of inevitable progress towards ever greater openness, democracy, and egalitarianism throughout the world, touching all nations and peoples until some form of quasi-utopia society of fairness may come within reach.

Because of this irony, we came to see Skullism, and the Skullists in particular, as a kind of Bizarro World counternarrative to the commonly depicted rosy scenario about of the 20th Century as being about the Great Liberation of Peoples.

Skullism represented everything that this rosy narrative was not supposed to be about. Instead of democracy, it was about highly concentrated power. Instead of egalitarianism and fairness, it was about bloodlines and privilege. Instead of openness and truth, it was about secrecy and lies.

And of course, instead of people, it was about skulls.

[1] This not to say we did not encounter many borderline cases of individuals who had moved in the circles of Skullists and flirted with Skullism, or who were half in the Skullist world. But we tended to agree about who those individuals were, and of those who were incontrovertibly fully Skullist. 

The Reich Unconquered

May 1, 1945 Bern, Switzerland.
[continued from here]

The main street through the old city is peaceful. The sun is shining. The Zytglogge, famous clock that inspired Einstein while he was at the patent office ticks off a minute.

On the street, at a kiosk, the morning newspaper is mounted on a board. At the kiosk a woman buys a pack of cigarettes. Berlin has fallen, the newspaper says in German.

The woman buys the cigarettes and walks down a side street.

She imagines the burnt out and destroyed city she has just read out.

She finds an inconspicuous door which leads to a flight of stairs. She unlocks the door, steps inside, then locks the door behind her. She presses a button and announces herself on an intercom. She then walks up the stairs and is buzzed through a door there, where she enters an office that is full of activity from many people in the room, at desks and typewriters, and in offices as well, the doors open. She greets a man through a door in an office who is wearing a tweed jacket and smoking a pipe. He is sitting at a desk looking at map.

She sits at a desk where there is a typewriter and multiple telephones.

At his desk. looks at her and smiles, and greets her, then takes another puff on his pipe and looks intently at the map. On his desk are multiple telephones as well, and a small flag of the United States. There is a photograph of Harry Truman on the wall.

It is a map of the front lines in Europe, the situation on the ground as of that morning, the boundaries between the forces of the Allies and the Axis, from Norway down to the Adriatic Sea.  His eyes study the contours of the lines on it.

He looks over the area near Berlin. The lines there show that the German resistance has collapsed. The Russians have even broke across the Elbe to be met by the rapidly approaching Americans and British forces.

He shakes his head, tsk tsk, as if in pity, contemplating the fate of the city and those in it. He can imagine the bunker, the Russian soldiers going through it. He has never been there, but he has read and heard much about it.

He can imagine the fugitives, certain ones that he knows so much of, and certain ones he has met personally. He can imagine one by name, whom he can imagine is probably dressed in a disguise, perhaps even as a woman, in hiding or trying to make his way through the enemy lines, to be rescued. Things will probably not go well for him, he imagines. If only he had gotten out earlier...

His gaze then shifts south from Berlin, through the circular area of Bohemia still held by the Reich forces---sheltered in the ring of the mountains (like a lunar crater in the middle of Europe, as Galileo once said). The mountains there are not impossible for the Russians, however. They didn't hold out the Germans in 1938, of course. It is only a matter of time before theyare penetrated and the German resistance is squeezed out of Czechoslovakia.  They will perhaps make a last stand in Prague in the High Tatras.

Then to Vienna, the city that was overrun by the Soviets three weeks ago.

The Russians did not advance much further than that. After Vienna fell, the remaining Panzer corps had retreated into the nearby Alps which were, for all intents and purposes, impenetrable to the Red Army, which was geared towards flat terrain, as every Russian Army had been.

The Russians did not to make much further headway up the Danube since then. They were throwing everything they had in the north, to try to put as much German ground behind them as possible before meeting up with the western Allies. It was the principal mission of the Soviet Army at that point.

Thus the Reich still held sway and existed in most of the Austrian highlands, all the way to the Swiss border. The war had not yet reached there. But everyone knows it is just a matter of time. Still, it affords precious days and weeks for those in the redoubt to make preparations for the inevitable. There is so much that needs to be handled, and stored, and moved. The man with the pipe imagines the scurry activity from people he knows are there---packing up documents, burying crates underground.

This of course had been the plan---the retreat to the Alps, where the Reich could gather its rest while it negotiated for survival in some form. How ironic that the man who so much had loved the idea of this, was now trying to make his way through the Allied lines in a house dress.

But there is more going on. The man with the map looks finally at the southern part of the map. There the contours of map are most interesting. In all the attention in the north, the two great Allied-Axis "fronts" meeting in central Germany as the Reich collapses, there is so little world attention being paid to the "Third Front," in northern Italy. There the Reich had surrendered the coastal fringe and the valley of the Po River to the Allies, but here they had done so by a quietly negotiated withdrawal. The territory still held by the Germans is extensive, and barely penetrated at all by the Russians.

Down by the Adriatic, the Germans are dug into the mountains as in Austria. But here in the south the mountains they held are not in landlocked area but close to the sea. In fact, as the man with the pipe knows very well, and can imagine in his mind, the Reich is still operating a navy in the ports in the Adriatic, even out of Trieste and Venice, where there are German u-boats docked peacefully in obscurity in the docklands, and in nearby bases.

They are waiting for passengers to arrive, and for goods to be loaded on board. There are many such boats, in more than one such location. In fact, as the man with the pipe knows, there is still a functioning German support system in the port areas. It is not only functioning but is being aided in my places by members of the Allied forces.

It is a complex operation against the clock to accomplish an extremely important goal. On it will depend so much.

The phone rings in the outer office.  She looks at it. She answers the phone differently depending on which phone rings. Knowing the difference is the essence of her job.

For this phone, she simply says "Good morning, Bern office."

A male voice says "Let me speak to the station chief.'

The woman says, "Right away, sir."

She leans back in her chair so the man in the office smoking the pipe can see her through the door. She nods. He nods back.

She puts through the call. He picks it up. A big wide grin breaks across his way. He greets the caller. They make small talk, in an old Ivy League companion way. He seems to come alive even more while talking to the person on the phone. As he talks, the man picks up a paperclip off his desk and turns it over while looking at it.

Then the voice on the phone asks him, "Say, how's that old clock of yours running lately?

Allen smiles broadly. He startes at the paperclip almost hynotically, as if it is a magic icon full of great power. He imagines the submarines in the docklands, and the passengers getting on board them.

He replies, nonchalantly,

"It is running quite smoothly. Smoothly, indeed."

The Philosophy of the Global Elite

[continued from this]
[see also The Defining Characteristic of the Global Elite]

From 1815 forward, history takes a sharp break. It was apparent to certain men at the time how different the new era was from the past.

There was an idea among educated men of many nations of the west that although Napoleon had ultimately been defeated, and the Congress of Vienna had attempted to restore the old order as much as possible, that nevertheless the old order in fact could not be restored but instead had been overthrown permanently.

In its place was an order almost as Napoleonic as if Napoleon himself were reigning as emperor of Europe. This was because above all Napoleon succeeded, as many saw it, because he was the quintessential embodiment of the spirit of the age, namely the triumph of reason and order over superstition and irrationality.

No where was this consciousness of the irreversible effects of Napoleon more felt than in Germany, which had undergone the most radical political realignment of any region of Europe during the wars.

The more dire consequence of the Napoleonic invasions and retreat had been the destruction of the the Reich (or First Reich as it was later called), after almost nine hundred years of continuous interrupted line [see note 1].  The Reich (i.e. Empire) was a loose confederated security alliance of over fifty smaller principalities, bishoprics, counties, baronies, duchies, free cities, and even a few major kingdoms, with an Imperial head. Most of these constitutent states were German speaking, but they also included notably Bohemia, which was Czech speaking. The emperor was technically elected but the seat had been held in Vienna by the King of Austria for long enough that Vienna was synonymous with the imperial capital.

The Reich in 1648

Napoleon abolished the Empire in 1806, putting in its place a rationalized German Confederation. But after the war, there was no going back again. The situation in German was permanently altered in favor of larger modern kingdoms. This included a Kingdom of Austria stripped of its imperial privilege but still the most powerful remaining German state (hence it was the seat of the conferece). It also included the Kingdom of Prussia, which was the largest post-Napoleonic German state by far. Prussia had in fact put up among the fiercest  and best resistance to Napoleon among  the Germans, and had been crucial to the victory at Waterloo.

Prussia was organized like a giant army throughout its society, from the king on down through the nobles to the peasants and serfs, who were still effectively bound to the land through the institution of the state. Prussians made excellent soldiers, and made up excellent fighting units. Not surprisingly, int he century after Napoleon, Prussia would eventually dominate not only the other smaller German states but even Austria.

Prussia was also where the men of thought arose, who formulated a  new rational philosophy based on the historical lessons that Napoleon had taught the rest of the world, even in defeat.


The first and foremost of these men was Fichte, who had fought in the great Battle of Nations for German independence against Napoleon in 1813. It was at this battle that many Germans from throughout the empire had first developed the idea of German nationhood, in the same way that the Revolutionary French conceived of a French nation.

Fichte's pupil was Hegel, who would hold the chair of the philosophy department in Berlin for many years. Hegel attempted a post-Kantian theory of history, which was highly influence to Marx, who was formulated a theory of history that was essentially Hegelian in character.

This explains the Marxian fascination for Napoleon as the ultimate actor of history. He is the embodiment of the idea of praxis, in that he by his actions actually crafts history by his will.

It also should furnish enough information to understand why Marxist philosophy, as it has evolved since Marx to the present moment, is the core philosophy of enlightenment of the elite. To be enlightened in a Marxist sense, and to be included in certain circles of great power, is to be a master of dialectic of the itself, to place oneself among the select few with ability to craft the transition from one great historical age to the next.

Hegel

 1. For reasons I will explain later, my preference here is to consider the Reich as dating from Otto I (i.e. around 962 A.D.)

The Skullists

(continued from previous post)

The Skullists---that's what T. and I came to call them, the small group of individuals who had captured our attention during our research into what was supposed to be a rather benign creative project (of writing a screenplay).

The name was perfect, we both agreed, and from then on we both knew exactly the specific people we were talking about, who up to that point had not really a name collectively.

Most obviously, they seemed to have a literal fascination with human skulls. Personally I came to conclude that the reason for this was the same as the fascination for skulls found throughout history--namely that is is an excellent way to create fear, awe, and reverence among other people. It has always been a good way to scare people off. Bogey man stuff. Oooga Booga. Turn back. Enter ye not here, lest ye shall suffer the consequences.

But there was an even deeper reason, no doubt one that arguably is connected with the reason I've already stated, namely that a fascination with skulls often manifests as a desire to create many new ones, in great blood-stained heaps, on battle grounds and killing fields.

This desire strikes the modern person as a primitive blood lust belonging to another era. Most rational modern human beings would never admit to wanting such things, or that such lusts are found only in psychopaths. Yet recent human history seems to provide an iron-clad argument that such phenomena (and thus such kinds of death-seeking passions) and not at all a rare relic of an earlier evolutionary time of humanity, but are still very much present in modern society, and in more than a few of the individuals that comprise it.

Chapter Zero. Preliminaries

[Ten years ago this month, my friend T. and I embarked on an amazing journey of intellectual curiosity. I made him a solemn promise I would write it up one day. So this is part of it, in case you're interested.  Mostly it is from memory, augmented with some recent fact checking. I promise to try to make it as accurate as possible, to what we figured out. I'll endeavor to correct anything that conflicts with the known historical record, as well, and add to it as I can.---M]

April 12, 1945

Vienna. Evening. Inside the old city, within sight of the palace where, one hundred and thirty years before, the delegates to the great Congress danced the evening away, while deciding the fate of the post-Napoleonic world, now a small group of soldiers of the Reich make a furious stand and against the soliders of the 3rd Ukrainian Front, which has poured into the city, having infiltrated the suburbs nine days before. By nightfall, the Soviets will have taken the last bridge on the Danube, and forced the last defenders out of the docklands. The Soviet Army will pour into the Danube chasing into the Alpine foothills for a last stand.

Out in the Pacific, where it is already the early morning of the 13th, on the island of Okinawa, the 22nd Marine Regiment is blasting out the Japanese defenders on the north end of the island. They are within sight of the tip. By mid day they will burn out the last defenders and complete the conquest of the island.

Inside a sunny room in Georgia, an man sitting in a chair rehearses a speak in his head. Everywhere around the globe the Axis powers are in retreat. The forces of the United Nations are on the verge of forging a great peace for the coming ages. From this peace, will have the opportunity to build world in which freedom and peace are the birthright of all peoples.

Across the room, a woman is painting his portrait. In the corner of the room, a large burly man in a suit stands silent and watching. As the woman paints at the easel she hears the old man mumble "I have a great pain in my head," and he slumps over.

Later the old man is a bed, in a room, surrounded by a doctor, a nurse, and the man in the suit. Another man is in the room, with grey hair and a suit.  The doctor looks at him. The man turns to the burly man in the suit and says, "Call the Vice President..."

In Washington, D.C., in an office building there are footsteps running down a hall.

Meanwhile, ten miles away in Moscow, inside a large office in the U.S. Embassy, the telephone rings.

A man sitting in a large leather looking out the window into the night time sky picks up the phone.

A voice mumbles on the phone.

"I see," says the man in the chair.

He turns and looks out the window in the Russian night.

In Washington, D.C., the footsteps of the runner reach a door. Truman is with his assistant.

"Mr. Truman, this is for you."

He reads it and looks up and his assistant with a grave face and nods.

As Truman is being sworn in as president, the man in the U.S. embassy is still looking out into the night. He nears the words of the old man in the house in Georgia.

From this peace, will have the opportunity to build world in which freedom and peace are the birthright of all peoples. 

A knock at the door. A messenger with a telegram. Mr. Ambassador. This just came in.

"Put it over there. Tell Mr. Kennan I would like to see him."

He hears the voice again:

The Allied powers which have won this great victory as the United Nations, now can go forward as the United Nations of peace. The leaders and representatives of the victorious nations must gather with the leaders of all nations who are willing to join the cause of freedom in creating this new order.

The man looking out the window is smiling.

The Great Crack-Up has begun

One can feel it in the air. Everyone who has been paying attention knows that it is underway.

I won't belabor you with a recap of the headlines, but anything coming out of the financial news lately is very ominous, as far as the world financial system. Everyone knows it is very susceptible to systematic collapse on a large scale. It is the inevitable mathematical consequence of the type of the debt-rigging that has been going on around the world since about 1982, when the current system was invented.

But a larger, long-term order is at threat, one that goes back before the early Eighties. More specifically we are seeing the severe loosening of the world order that was created in the late 1940's, in the wake of World War II. Much of what we assume about the world, based on the situation coming out of those years, could undergo great change in the near future.

The current world order dates from around the invention of modern television networks in the United States, which happened in about 1947. That was thus the year that modern pop culture was invented, and gradually assumed the role of the de facto religion of our society (replacing nearly all the functions of the various churches, which are a now a subculture within America).

But television is going away. The stranglehold that television has had over America, and the world, will become more apparent as the control ebbs away.

That this is happening in conjunction with the collapse of the post-1982 financial order is no accident, since it was the controlling interests of the post-1947 world order who positioned themselves to take advantage of the financial revolution (in a way that allowed them to manufacture enough money to buy out the rest of the world). So they are essentially going down together.

I agree with my friend Doug, however. What comes after will feel like living hell to some of the people who have gleaned the fat from the old system, especially in the latter days, and who are unwilling to repent. For a great many people, and most people, in fact, it is going to feel like a breath of fresh air, and a bit of liberation.