We Won a Battle – Are We Losing the War?

“I have of late, lost all my mirth,

Such that this goodly frame, the earth

Seems to me a sterile promontory;

Golden fire frets roof in glory

Majestical, but foul and pestilent,

Vapours gather, and are spent.

What a piece of work is man!

When he formulates a plan

‘Gainst nature, how very like a god!

He presses boots so heavily shod

Upon his fellow, so that he will learn

That everyone must have their turn

Or, dust and ashes, all will burn.”

(with apologies to William Shakespeare)

October 2017: One hundred years ago Lenin issued his famous call to arms and ‘the people’ (well, a few of them) rose up and defenestrated a crumbling, rotting ancien regime.

I would be easy to scoff.  H. L. Mencken, in his “Observations of Government,” suggested that “Political revolutions, in truth, do not often accomplish anything of genuine value; their one undoubted effect is simply to throw out one gang of thieves and put in another.”  But with due respect to Mencken, he overlooks the fact that revolutions can achieve a lot. Take the USSR, that mighty experiment in social reform.  From 1917 to 1990, it achieved great things, our list of which is but a paltry sample:

1. Genocide;
2. Mass starvation;
3. Mass Censorship;
4. The destruction of Individuality and defamation by decree;
5. The death of objective truth and imposition of State indoctrination;
6. The debasement of culture;
7. The murder of deities, and their replacement with new deities;
8. Confiscation of land and property without compensation;
9. The demonization of heresy;
10. The seizure and ring-fencing of the means of production;
11. Suspension/bastardisation of human rights (freedom of speech, association, right to a fair trial, etc.);
12. The manipulation and or appropriation of the free market (of goods, prices and incomes, and ideas).

The Varnished Culture looks around and finds that we are, here and abroad, well up-with-the-clock on many items from the above list.  This tends to suggest that, maybe, the fall of the wall and the USSR was but a battle, and that the Real War continues.  The War currently has subtler forms – economics, social mores, identity politics…lambs-wool on a wolf’s back!