JACQUES R. PAUWELS—On the ruins of the Ancien Régime, which had served the interests of the nobility and the Church, [the moderate revolutionaries] erected a state that was supposed to be in the service of the well-to-do burghers. Politically, these solid gentlemen initially found a home in the “club” or embryonic political party of the Feuillants, subsequently in that of the Girondins. The latter name reflected the place of origin of its leading element, a contingent of members of the bourgeoisie of Bordeaux, the great harbour on the banks of the Gironde estuary, whose wealth was based not only on trade in wine but also, and primarily, in slaves.
Default Editor Patrice de Bergeracpas
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Capitalism Is A Misanthropic, Dystopian Religion
19 minutes readCAITLIN JOHNSTONE—Capitalism is a misanthropic, dystopian religion. By “capitalism” I mean this or any other possible system wherein mass-scale human behavior is driven by the pursuit of capital. By “religion” I mean organized collective faith-based belief system.
In times past the dominant religions had names like “Christianity” or “Islam”, which were used to promote doctrines that shaped societies, dominated civilizations, and built entire empires. Theocratic institutions labored on behalf of the powerful to bend entire continents to their will, using narratives about beneficent invisible deities as cover. Nowadays the dominant religion is called capitalism, and the theocratic institutions are called governments, and the beneficent deity is called the invisible hand of the market.
In the old religions, people would gather once a week in a building to be indoctrinated by clergymen. In the new religion the clergymen come to indoctrinate you right in the comfort of your own home on screens showing news, TV shows, and Hollywood movies.
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Space Colonization Is A Capitalist Perception Management Op
23 minutes readCAITLIN JOHNSTONE—We’re not going to rocket ship our way out of this mess. We’re not going to be able to keep doing things the way we are doing them. The “growth for its own sake” ideology that Musk and Bezos have dedicated their lives to embodying is, as Edward Abbey put it, the ideology of a cancer cell. Such an ideology is unsustainable. We’re going to have to change.
“I must change” is always the first possibility that an ego rules out when evaluating a dilemma, and it’s the same ego which says we are separate individuals, and it’s the same ego which created our dilemma in the first place. But we must change. We must transcend the ego.
That’s always the last thing anyone wants to hear, that we need to change, but it’s true. We’ll either collectively change our minds in a way that enables us to drastically shift the way we operate on this planet, or we’ll go extinct. It is evolve or die time. We’ll either make it or we won’t.
Space will not save us, and we will never colonize it. We can explore space, but it will be done via satellites and other tech, not by living organisms. Our astronauts have up until this point been nothing more than glorified scuba divers, entirely dependent on boxes of Earth’s ecosystem, no more independent from that ecosystem than someone holding their breath. This will remain the case.
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The Hitler-Stalin Pact of August 23, 1939: Myth and Reality
53 minutes readJACQUES PAUWELS—Thanks to the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact, the Soviet Union not only gained valuable space, but also valuable time, namely the extra time they needed to prepare for a German attack that was originally scheduled for 1939 but had to be postponed until 1941. Between 1939 and 1941, much crucially important infrastructure, above all factories producing all sorts of war materiel, were transferred to the far side of the Urals. Moreover, in 1939 and 1940, the Soviets had an opportunity to observe and study the war that raged in Poland, Western Europe, and elsewhere, and thus to learn valuable lessons about Germany’s modern, motorized, and “lightning-fast” style of offensive warfare, the Blitzkrieg. The Soviet strategists learned, for example, that the concentration of the bulk of one’s armed forces for defensive purposes right at the border would be fatal, and that only a “defense in depth” offered the possibility of stopping the Nazi steamroller. It would be, inter alia, thanks to the lessons learned that way that the Soviet Union would manage – admittedly with great difficulty – to survive the Nazi onslaught in 1941 and eventually to win the war against that mighty foe.
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Cancel Culture and the Bankruptcy of Liberalism
10 minutes readROGER HARRIS—Kovalik is a dedicated leftist critical of the Democratic Party. “We as the American electorate,” he observes, “are never given anything but the choice between sociopaths for President.” Kovalik comments further: “I for one am quite alarmed to think of what a Biden policy of ‘getting tougher’ with Russia would look like, and what kind of catastrophe it could bring about…. It simply boggles the mind how the mainstream media and the Democratic Party elite are willing to compromise world peace and public health all in the interest of political gain.”