Month: June 2016

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Sunrise After Brexit

 

Sunrise attrib Wikipedia Commons
Sunrise
attrib Wikipedia Commons

The morning after the Brexit vote, one imagines Britons awakening with a similar sense of bewilderment, and a diametrically opposed sense of outcome.  Those who voted Leave, woke up with a tentative sense of blissful relief, as if a migrainous pressure behind their eyes had been lifted with the rising sun, and they could safely view the rays for the first time in a long time without averting their sight.  The Remainers awoke also bewildered, but adjusting to a massive hangover painfully focusing the reality of a resultant wakeup from a decades long bender.  Both likely thought, “What just happened?”.  What just happened will take some time to sort out, but the makings of something very significant for people in Britain, and beyond, has clearly and irreversibly occurred.

The outcome of the momentous vote in Great Britain on June 23rd to leave formal membership in the European Union spared no one’s worldview.  In the stunning bullseye of the outcome stood the Prime Minister of Great Britain himself, David Cameron.  Completely misinterpreting his constituents fundamental concerns with an ever more encompassing elitist need to control their lives, Cameron felt he could use fear tactics regarding a world after Leave without elitists’ guarantees of stability for all would be enough to impel the great undereducated to support an establishment who would look after them. He was so wrong, that it appears his political mandate so recently secured in the parliamentary elections of 2015,  has been scuttled.  He has announced his intent to resign. The British people spoke in 2015, and thus they spoke again.  Like most leaders who, upon retaining power, assume it is all about them, Cameron found out that both his comprehensive victory in 2015 and his crashing defeat in 2016, were decidedly not about him.  Likewise, the American President Obama, who likes to declare in profound elitist egocentrism  every time an opposing opinion to his worldview gains traction, “This is not the America we want,”  discovered that the people of Great Britain didn’t find his preening intervention in the issue helpful in the least.   It turns out British citizens wanted to let Obama know, “This is not the Britain we want.”

What has transpired I suspect, is a very natural human reaction to excess.  When the Industrial Revolution brought for the first time a means by which individuals could achieve the position of kings without a hereditary portfolio and in the interval of a single lifetime, the benefits were profound, but so were the excesses.  As wealth spilled out from the exclusive domain of royalty and clergy,  millions of people attained the benefits of a meaningful life filled with both security and bounty.  Lives progressively became less the fight for survival then the search for personal worth and meaning.  The elites were progressively shunted aside to directional forces determined by the proletariat and burgeoning middle class.  Transportation became universal. Food became plentiful. A life now stable became increasingly worthwhile to maintain one’s health.  All good things. However, the darker impulses were also apparent.  The individualism left other important communal outcomes wanting.  The environment sustained critical damage. Morality became a relic, with diminished roles for family, increasing pleasure absorption, and an increasingly bitter sense of being left out, once the reality of opportunities for success was progressively available to all.  The most aggressively destructive forces in the twentieth century were not led by the elites, but rather the out of control proletariat that coopted nations into tools of domination.  Common men led the most egregious – the journalist Mussolini Fascist Italy, the failed painter Hitler Germany, the would be priest Stalin, the pseudo intellectual Mao.  Worse than their own perverted sense of progress was their willingness and ability to draw millions like them into armies of mass destruction.

The world that barely survived this excess turned to elitists to save them.  Post war communal arrangements were designed to soften the worst traits of nearly destroyed world of the out of control individualism and national primitivism.  The new meme of the elites was “globalism”. Individuals, and the nations they personified would subvert their baser tendencies to a global sharing through the guidance of elites.  Companies in competition would consolidate into global corporations in sync with shared values. Nations in competition would align with others to redistribute resources, regulate excesses, and degenerate their uniqueness.  Shared money, shared language shared aspirations, shared outcomes would remove the calamitous instincts of individuals to ‘get ahead’, and the world would forever grow beyond the need for violence, greed, and flag waving that got us into all this trouble in the first place.  The new wars would be against other – climate, division, asymmetry, and sexuality.  Sure there would be some unbalanced aspects.  Elites would preserve their world and flourish.  The rest would see the benefits of the elites beneficence – just like  in the olden times.

The Elites – the Harvard trained Obama and the Eton and Oxford prepared Cameron – could not comprehend that the average individual might want to bring some meaning to their lives by living their lives differently.  The Elites had extended their altruism to the point where they demanded to provide solutions for aspects of life where there were no identified problems to solve. Brexit was not so much a negation of all that came before but a democratic break to the undemocratic impulses of those who would determine that the future is a settled science of vast bureacracies, infinite regulations, removal of moral constraints, and destruction of free will and individual opportunity.

The morning sunrise after Brexit brings the faintly uncomfortable sense of a world less predictable.  As Groucho Marx cogently once said, he would be uncomfortable belonging to any club that would have him as a member. As a result of Brexit, older forces may have to be monitored for and deftly dealt with.  Germany’s natural inclination to dominate the continent and to gaze toward the East. Great Britain’s tenuous hold on its own unified sovereignity with such a close but divergent opinion as to the best course for its future. America’s isolationist tendencies and longing for a simplier world when it could self gaze safely behind a moat of surrounding oceans.

The better option is likely a form of compromise that preserves the best of what both elites and proliterians have to offer, without allowing the worst characteristics of each to see a world better off without each doing its part.   Thanks to a bunch of conflicted but resolute Britons who trusted themselves, the world has a chance again to take a breath, and breathe the beautiful air of freedom.  This particular sunrise, for those of us who still man the Ramparts of Civilization,  is one moment worthy of the sentiments of Rule Britainnia :

The nations, not so blest as thee,
Must, in their turns, to tyrants fall;
While thou shalt flourish great and free,
The dread and envy of them all.
“Rule, Britannia! rule the waves:
“Britons never will be slaves.”

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Newspeak

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The horrendous event of the past weekend in Orlando deserves a special capability of expression that is beyond my ability.  Murder, as always, senseless and evil,  in the instantaneous elimination of innocents whose only crime was to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, to be unwitting  participant actors in some twisted individual’s immorality play.  We are living through example after example of a particular kind of hate, that hates us for what we are, our willingness to express the truth about our selves, our need to be individuals.  It is a malign virus that continues to infect, because we struggle to understand its etiology, and refuse to initiate and follow through on the means of its eradication.  In the simple clarity brought by the battle for survival when facing devastating infection, we will either eliminate it, or it will eliminate us.  It is our choice, and our burden.

Unfortunately, what is following as we distance ourselves from this event, as has been our want for some time, is our willingness to allow the subversion of free thought and free speech by those in authority to bend the truth to their predestined conclusions.  George Orwell, the nom de plume of English essayist and novelist Eric Blair, achieved his greatest fame sadly at the very end of his life, in creating a literary dystopian world in 1984.   His masterpiece best described the potential epilogue of the very real dangers Elliot saw in the world he lived in, from the clashes of idealism and gross manipulation of the Spanish civil war, the show trials of Stalinist Russia, to the calamity of Fascism and the destruction of truth it created.  Orwell was one of those unique individuals who lived in the transitional zone between the world of oppression and the means of oppressors, and still was able to recognize the tools required to defeat both.  The primary tool to defeat oppression, that of free expression, he presciently saw under dangerous assault, and battled his rapidly deteriorating health to give us the ability to discern through the novel  the dystopian future we needed to be on guard against.

Orwell brought special clarity to the tools of authoritarian  control and its need to rewrite and subvert history to fit the authority’s ever changing narrative, destroy truth, and reduce expression that does not fit the excepted narrative.  Orwell’s everyman anti-hero Winston Smith, works at the Ministry or Truth, whose job is to constantly to constantly rewrite previous history, so that it fits with current thought.  The weapon of destruction is Orwell’s Newspeak:

“Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we will make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. ”                                                                                        George Orwell     1984

Our current process is to effect our narrative by making thought expressions a crime, a thoughtcrime, thereby distorting the truth.  For our current story, it is the unwillingness to identify radical Islam, to avoid saying it and therefore avoid recognizing its existence.  If it is not said, it does not exist, and its elimination is unnecessary.  Clarity of understanding of last weekend’s slaughter, requires recognizing the truth, as it did with the slaughter at San Bernardino, the slaughter in Belgium, the slaughter in Paris, and the innumerable clarifying events before.  Instead we focus our narrative on the gun as apparently an active participant, willing an otherwise conflicted individual with undefined motives to kill for the sake of killing and applying the opportunity the gun provides.  We block our minds to the true linking theme to each horrible event, the nihilist philosophy that this unique religion underwrites, and do not connect our events to the pressure cooker bomb of Boston, the throwing of bound homosexuals off buildings in Syria, the burning alive of Yasidi women who refuse to be raped slaves in Iraq, and the stabbing of Israelis in Jerusalem.  The weapon is immaterial, the truth is the philosophy of dominance and death.  The authorities seek through doublethink to criminalize those who obey the law and wish to defend themselves, decriminalize those who break the law but are seen as a protected class, and ostracize those who are willing to speak openly.  The narrative replaces truth, the ‘science’ becomes settled,  and the willingness to ignore objective facts that don’t fit the desired narrative ingrained.  All refugees are deserving.  All moralities are equal. All crimes are suffered upon a society that has created a state of victimhood, and therefore a narrative of justification to every appalling event, large and small.

Orwell saw his world becoming progressively immune to great horrors, acceptant of an ‘arc’ of history that makes sacrifice of individuals an unpleasant but accepted consequence of those unwilling to accept the arc. Our society is progressively becoming an ugly reproduction of Orwell’s vision, and the sacrifice of our freedoms on the altar of accepted correctness of thought a very real impediment to actually solving any of our societal ills, much less defending ourselves against the unwavering malignity of our sworn civilizational enemies.

If you need a reminder of how close to Orwell’s dystopia we are evolving and the extent to which our civilization’s values are cratering, look not to our leaders like Obama who will not speak the truth. Look to how our society has educated those into Newspeak on our campuses, the sources of our future leaders.  Watch the recent event at Yale University below in its entirety, and understand that the thoughtcrime committed by a dormitory leader was that he made the mistake of defending the right of individuals to self express and wear Halloween costumes on campus.  Watch it to the end, and realize we are close to the world of Oceania.

 

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People We Should Know #29 – Garry Kasparov

Garry Kasparov - Chess World Champion....and Human Rights Champion
Garry Kasparov – Chess World Champion….and Human Rights Champion

The loneliest place in the world is likely at the chess board in a grandmaster world championship chess match.  Sitting across is the greatest computational foe imaginable, a fellow grandmaster, who is probing for any weakness in conception, multi-dimensional thinking,  preparation and study,  courage, and stamina.  One hesitation, one casual move, one momentary weakness, and the match is good as lost. The match may extend hours, or days, the competition-months.  The crushing pressure has been too great for some, and destroyed the health of others.  To play grandmaster chess requires an intellect and a will that is present in very, very few of humanity.  53 year old Garry Kasparov is one of the greatest ever grand champions, and the number of people who could claim a capacity to compete with him on at his level at chess, are able to be counted on one hand.  Garry Kasparov retired from competitive championship level chess in 2005, but he has since 2005 taken on his greatest opponent ever in the ever more dangerous game of chess that is Russian politics.  He has determined to take the white pieces championing democracy and free speech. His opponent, Vladimir Putin, the dictator of Russia, is most comfortable with the black pieces, and cares not one wit for the rules of civility.  He has worked to eliminate Kasparov’s fellow pieces one by one, working toward a final deadly check mate.

Garry Kasparov is in the match of his life and is courageously willing to play through to the match’s conclusion.  As one of the great defenders of civilization’s ramparts,  Garry Kasparov is Ramparts:   People We Should Know – #29. 

Garry Kasparov was born in 1963 in the Soviet Union’s Azerbaijan Republic to jewish and armenian parents.  His father died when he was seven, and consistent with prodigiously talented children of the soviet, the state provided further paternal guidance.  His tremendous talent for chess and its challenges became known very early, and in a country that valued superiority in chess as another example of the superior societal model, Kasparov received exceptional training.  By age 15, he was a chess master, by 17 a grandmaster, and at 22 years of age, the youngest world champion up to his time ever crowned. But training wasn’t Kasparov’s secret – it was his soaring intellect and indomitable will.  He played for the world champion ship in 1984 against one of the great Soviet chess machines, Anatoli Karpov, in a brutal match that saw an incredible number of draws that left Karpov ahead but exhausted, and the match was called mysteriously before a conclusion.  A rematch was set for 1985, and this time Kasparov broke Karpov’s defensive style and became at 22 years old the youngest champion ever.  For 15 years, Kasparov fought off every great world champion, including multiple challenges by Karpov, relinquishing the title finally in 2000.  His run was considered one of the most dominant in chess history, and his 2005 retirement from world competition allowed many fellow grand masters to breathe a sigh of relief.

Kasparov’s true awakening occurred however, in 1991 with the fall of the Soviet Union.  Flush with the vitality of new found freedom and one of his country’s most important ambassadors,  Kasparov found himself contributing to Russia’s nascent development of democratic institutions.  He was one of the founders of Democratic Party of Russia, which morphed into a centrist party of Russia’s Choice promoting  Boris Yeltsin against the communists attempting a resurgence.  He became intimate friends with Boris Yeltsin’s first protege Boris Nemtsov.  When the ailing Yeltsin was pressured away from naming the liberal democrat Nemtsov as his successor, and instead handed it to a little known KGB apparachnik named Vladimir Putin, Russia’s future became dark and progressively totalitarian.  Kasparov, seeing the predictable pattern of dictator in Putin, attempted to marshal political forces against him, working with Nemtsov and others to form the Other Russia as a democratic political alternative to Putin’s autocracy.  Kasparov attempted to run for President in opposition to Putin in 2007, but the Putin machine prevented any momentum, and Kasparov progressively saw his life straying onto thinner and thinner ice. He was sham arrested several times, and many of his friends were harassed and more ominously experienced violent deaths. Many were among the most prominent Putin opponents and defenders of human rights and free speech in Russia.  The dogged anti Putin investigational reporter, Anna Politkovskaya, was murdered in Moscow.  The Putin antagonist Alexander Litvinenko, a British citizen, was poisoned with nuclear material and painfully killed in London. Most brazenly, Nemtsov was murdered right in front of the Kremlin. The message could not have been more clear. Behind all the events, the common thread – opponents of Vladimir Putin.  Kasparov realized his best chance for survival and continuing the message of freedom for Russians would be outside the country, and he has taken residence in New York City since 2013.   His lectern is as head of the Human Rights Foundation, whom he succeeded the sainted Vaclav Havel as leader.  Despite the enormous personal risks, he has continued to speak out against Putin’s dictatorship and his thuggish mafia like record of assassinations, beatings, arrests, and one party rule. He recently was interviewed by Jay Nordlinger at the Oslo Freedom Forum.  Jay through his interview show on Ricochet , Q&A , has often highlighted the many courageous people who attend the Oslo Forum and are often the sole spokespersons for freedom in the dangerous totalitarian countries in which they reside.  Below please take in Jay’s interview with Garry Kasparov, who locked in mortal combat with his most dangerous opponent ever in Vladimir Putin, is one of freedom’s brightest lights, and justly Ramparts: People We Should Know  #29.