Stealth Bombers . . .

I append an extract from a draft of an unfinished document begun in January of this year. Even in its uncompleted state, it still has, I think, something of relevance to say:

‘From the London Times of 22/1/2009: "The LSE economist Robert Wade addressed about 1,000 Icelanders recently at a protest meeting in a Reykjavik cinema, warning that large-scale civil unrest was on the way. The tipping point, he said, would be this spring."

Nothing very surprising in that, given the likely nature of the audience and implicitly the speaker. But it is significant. It strikes me almost as wishful thinking – the article that the quote is taken from comments, rather wistfully it seems, that ‘some say it could become another 1968 – a new age of rebellion.’

There are factors sufficient in the current economic situation to produce chaos and social breakdown of their own accord should they be allowed continue unabated. But to this must be added the fact that there are people who are hellbent on creating just such a social breakdown. Konrad Heiden, who was a German opponent of Hitler’s and who knew Hitler personally, described a certain déclassé element that supported Hitler as the ‘armed bohemians’. And indeed this term could almost be used to describe the element that is currently trying to foment trouble and collapse on all fronts. Except that technically they belong to the Left – to the extent that the terms Right and Left longer have any relevance. Best perhaps they could be described as nihilists or anarchists.

There is a certain type of international agitator that currently fits the bill – middle class, generally swanning around the world on an allowance from daddy, without job or career, except perhaps a few diplomas or an unfinished degree from the LSE or some other such fashionable institute. Really, they are not political at all – more what Lenin used describe as ‘useful idiots’. It seems to me that what they really are into is street theatre, posturing with petrol bombs and slings and ball-bearings, intent on creating an image for themselves that seems ‘cool’. Certainly one imagines there is very little intellect behind it. As well, one imagines that it is a phenomenon in the process of creation – rather in the way that stars and planets are said to condense out of globules of gaseous matter; certainly there is no finished aspect to it, and I would not be surprised if it, at the moment of self-consciousness, finds itself on the radical right rather than the left – or at least predominantly so.

For the fact is that the mainstream Left works much closer to the coal face, engaged in the ‘rights’ and ‘equality’ industry. This is one of the staples of Marxist agitation: to take the proclaimed tenets of capitalist society – say, liberty, fraternity, equality – and push them out to the point that they become weapons for the undermining of that society. Of course there can be no argument in the normal course of events against seeking to extend rights or gain greater equality. But the point is that the success or otherwise of such campaigns is of secondary importance to, certainly, revolutionary Marxists and anarchists: the primary value of such things lies in the extent to which they inch society closer to the edge of the abyss.

Take the ‘equality’ industry . . . One philosopher has written quite well on it – Mary Midgeley – without at the same time necessarily following the argument to its logical conclusion. The fact is that there can be no intermediate halt to demands for equality short of reducing society to a flat level desert of undifferentiated rubble. Whenever an ‘equality’ is argued for and gained in one field, another deserving cause immediately presents itself, and so on and on – all the time boring like woodworm, until at last society is undermined and collapses in on itself. It is a variant on the statement by Lenin – and a way of achieving the same end by different means – that equated revolution to a bomb in the basement of an apartment building, reducing it all to rubble, out of which the revolutionary party could then begin to build the mythical classless society.

The architect, by way of digression, of this new Marxist approach was primarily Antonio Gramsci, an Italian Communist who died in prison (of natural causes) in 1937 under Mussolini. Realizing before most that the revolution was not going to be achieved on the barricades, he sought instead a way of achieving it by stealth. From now on Marxists “must join in whatever liberating causes might come to the fore in different countries and cultures as popular movements, however dissimilar those movements might initially be from Marxism and from one another. Marxists must join with women, with the poor, with those who find certain civil laws oppressive. They must adopt different tactics for different cultures and subcultures. They must never show an inappropriate face. And, in this manner, they must enter into every civil, cultural and political activity in every nation, patiently leavening them all as thoroughly as yeast leavens bread . . . a quiet and anonymous revolution. No armed and bloody uprisings would do it. No bellicose confrontations would win the day. Rather, everything must be done in the name of man’s dignity and rights, and in the name of his autonomy and freedom from outside constraint. From the claims and constraints of Christianity, above all.”

The above quote is from Malachi Martin, a controversial priest and writer, and an opponent of Vatican II. But it does cover the main points. I saw the idea being advanced in the sixties . . .’