This is follow up to Israel Shamir's Analysis of Breivik's Ideas; the first part can be found on http://www.israelshamir.net/English/Unmanning-II.htm
The Friday 22 Massacre
Part Two. Breivik Sees Red
By Israel Shamir
Breivik hated Reds even more than Muslims. The Pakis should be deported, but the Commies – shot as traitors, he wrote in his 2083. He fumed against communism like Hitler in Mein Kampf, but Hitler had better reasons. Hitler competed against the Communists for the hearts of German workers, AND Hitler competed against the softies within the national-socialist movement in Germany, who (notably the brothers Strasser) were prepared to deal with communists.
A long time has passed since then. Communism won in the titanic struggle of 1945, but suffered a huge setback in 1991 with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Consequently, anticommunism has lost its meaning since at least 1991, but probably even earlier. Today, it could possibly mobilise a few old-timers in Washington DC, but maybe not even them.
It is with great astonishment we witnesses of Communism's defeat read in 2083 that Communism was victorious:
"The US but especially W. Europe lost the Cold War due to the fact that we didn't persecute the Marxists after WW2. If we had executed each and every Marxist and banned Marxist doctrines (not only the economical aspects but the cultural as well – internationalism, extreme feminism, extreme egalitarianism, anti-elitism, anti-nationalism) we would not be in the current situation. Instead, our traitorous and weak minded post-WW2 leaders allowed the Marxists to gradually infiltrate many aspects of society after WW2, especially our universities and the media (see the beginning of book 1 for a complete overview of how this happened). The first ML pioneers (Marxist-Leninists) were allowed to indoctrinate the '68 generation, those who run things today."
Breivik arrives at the unexpected conclusion that both the EU and the US are, in our present age, "socialist" or even "communist" states, "EUSSR and USSR" organised in accordance with Marx's teachings. I did not know that Karl Marx envisaged a society with hundreds of billionaires and millions of paupers. One would have to be mad to describe the contemporary US and EU as "communist dictatorships" – these societies are extremely inegalitarian -- workers are on the bottom, while the super-wealthy have an ostentatious lifestyle unheard of even in Medici's Florence.
The reason for this unexpected conclusion is that Breivik intentionally confuses Marxism-Leninism as the ruling ideology of the Soviet Union and Maoist China, with the neo-Marxist western ideology of Fromm and Adorno, Marcuse and Lukacs. With all due respect, the Cold War was NOT a war with them, but a war against the USSR and its allies, a war with its geopolitical as well as ideological components. Western neo-Marxists were rather the allies of the Capitalist West in that war, and their contribution to the fall of the Eastern citadel of Communism was enormous, as they successfully undermined the Russian elites' belief in their own ideology.
Though Breivik quarrels with the Western Marxists, he finds it convenient to connect them with the Gulag and with alleged mass murders in the USSR. This is dishonest: the Western neo-Marxists were against Stalin, and they called their Eastern brethren "Stalinists", at least since the short-sighted Khrushchev's denunciation of Stalin in 1956.
Khrushchev, a crypto-Trotskyite, frogmarched the Communists through an unnecessary and unpopular de-Stalinisation instead of letting bygones be bygones. Nowadays President Medvedev is talking again about de-Stalinisation; probably this talk will prevent his re-election. The people of Russia have differing views about Stalin, but the vast majority were and are against de-Stalinisation, for to them it symbolises the breakdown of the national masculine heroic paradigm.
Breivik accuses the Communists of supporting "extreme feminism". This is odd. Joseph Stalin was the ultimate symbol of masculinity: the great Yugoslav director Dushan Makkaveev depicted him in his Mysteries of the Organism in priapic form. De-Stalinisation can be viewed as an attempt to unman the Father-figure of the Communist world. Again, Breivik's ridiculous claim can be explained by his desire to gather all the Reds into one big heap: from grim NKVD commissars to California sociologists to the Norwegian teenagers he shot. He learned this nasty trick from his Neocon teachers: they paint every nationalist by the same brush as Adolf Hitler.
We reject it out of hand: not every traditionalist and nationalist is a Breivik or a Hitler; the Communists take differing positions on tradition, with Eastern Stalinists being quite conservative, traditional and mildly nationalist, while Western neo-Marxists rejected the bourgeois nationalism which caused two world wars.
Breivik stresses the Communist origins of the Frankfurt school's founders, of Theodor Adorno and Georg Lukács – but the neocons, too, were red-diaper babies or even active Trots before switching sides. Gramsci indeed dreamed of cultural hegemony as the means of arriving at socialism. He thought that a new "Communist man" might be created before any political revolution. However, Gramsci was mistaken. This theory of Gramsci was used to preach a reformist, non-revolutionary way, avoiding a violent takeover of banks and factories. The idea was played up by the Euro-Communists and, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, disappeared with the Euro-Communist parties.
Lenin was right, and Gramsci was wrong: you have to take away from the capitalists both their chequebooks and their factories, their weapons and their newspapers, their parliament and their government, otherwise they will turn every agenda of yours to their benefit. The Frankfurt school and other Western neo-Marxists stood by the West in the Cold War.
The Western neo-Marxists behaved like the proverbial man who searched for a lost coin under the lamppost. Though he knew he had lost the coin elsewhere, there was more light under the lamppost. They did not know how to interact with workers, and so preferred to work with minorities, students, feminists. It was easier, but led nowhere, as we now see. The workers of Spain and Greece rose up last month, but the neo-Marxists were nowhere to be found. They did not lead this real popular revolt, as they were only used to their toy revolutions in the field of semantics.
The neo-Marxists gave up on revolution, gave up on socialism, gave up on the workers, and instead preferred to work "so no future Holocaust would be possible". Kevin McDonald, from California State University, wrote that they choose to follow their Jewish agenda rather than the Communist one. Breivik had not read McDonald the Terrible, or at least never referred to him, being such a good pupil of Jewish pundits. KMD's explanation was forbidden to him. He just intoned that what these men did IS communism. Actually, many texts in 2083 are old anti-Jewish screeds with find/replace Jews by Marxists.
Regretfully Breivik was wrong: the communists did not win. We did not move even one step closer to communism by promoting gay marriages and multiculturalism. Fighting against Christianity and family does not help, either. All these steps were appropriated and used by Capital and against workers. Actually, the objectives of socialist revolution and "no more Holocausts at any cost" are mutually exclusive. For the first objective, we need brave and daring men, for the second, all men must be unmanned, for real men are unpredictable.
The proof that Breivik speaks nonsense (even in his own terms) can be found in his2083, where he rates European states according to their acceptance of what he calls "cultural Marxism". Not surprisingly, Russia and other countries of the Communist block are the freest from this dogma, while Germany, Sweden and Norway are the most subservient. Indeed, destructive western neo-Marxist theories were never popular in the East, where capitalism was dismantled in the real sense and there was no need for a make-believe pseudo-communist ideology to paper over a capitalist economy.
As for the West, 1968 was not, as Breivik says, V-day for Marxism, but the beginning of a turn towards the Iron Heel. Our freedoms peaked just after the long-gone year of 1968. 1968 was a turning point in America. In 1968, the richest Americans contributed 90% of their income to the state, while now they pay less than 30% (never mind that they do not pay even that much by cleverly exploiting tax shelters, exempt funds and other tricks). It was in 1968 that the American worker's minimum pay peaked in real terms. Looking back, 1968 was the moment in history when mankind was nearest to the stars.
As children of the defeated '68 revolution, we were free to love, smoke, think and act. We could travel and fly without being stripped at the airport, and our booze was not confiscated. We could make love and smoke in cafés. Since then, it has been downhill all the way: smoking has been banned, free thought has been incarcerated by Political Correctness, and political action has been reduced to joining a Facebook group.
In the US, as Noam Chomsky has told me, the U-turn coincided with the teachers' strike in New York which reminded the Jews that their narrow interests are not necessarily best served by progressive and revolutionary tactics. Accordingly, the revolutionary ideologists of '68 acquiesced in pacifying the masses, and the chances for a new holocaust or even loss of influence were indeed minimised.
The masculinity of the Left receded, too. Support of dubious gender politics and retreat from the class struggle changed the Left. While the Left had always pushed for equality between the sexes, this equality leaned rather towards the masculine pole: whether it was a worker building the barricade, sailors storming the Winter Palace, cigar-smoking barbudos of Castro, they were all manly symbols of the Left. During the epic confrontation of the first half of 20th century, the Red Guards were not more feminine than the Stormtroopers, and Ernst Thaelmann was not less masculine than Ernst Roehm.
The present misbalance of male/female factors in the developed world was caused by technological developments (man's physical strength is less needed), by ideological shift and by capitalists' desire to maximise profit by employing women. As a result, men are frustrated. Their old traditional role of providers is over; their jobs went away to China, fighting is done by drones. Breivik's massacre bears the mark of a frustrated and marginalized Norwegian man.
Breivik felt his manhood threatened by "television, where nearly every major offering has a female 'power figure' and the plots and characters emphasize the inferiority of the male and superiority of the female… by government-mandated employment preferences and practices that benefit women and use 'sexual harassment' charges to keep men in line, [by] colleges where women's gender studies proliferate and 'affirmative action' is applied in admissions and employment."
Yes, the killer is a psychotic man whose vision is hardly adequate, but his point should be considered. Even his hatred towards Muslim immigrants could be traced to the threat to his manhood presented by virile, unencumbered-by-fear-of-harassment-charges Southerners successfully competing for the charms of the Nordic girls. This massacre and its possible follow-ups might well have been averted if this European man did not feel his manhood threatened in so many ways.
The massacre is a sign that the Yin/Yang balance of Europe is severely biased; it should be restored and this urgent task can't be delayed – this is an important lesson of the Friday 22 massacre.
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