However, that means that Counter Reformation Jesuits were ahead of the curve. They developed intellectual and anti intellectual weapons way before socialism was invented.

AesopFan on August 17, 2018 at 12:10 pm at 12:10 pm said:

The priest in charge was one of the “Priests for the Third World.” He wore a black leather jacket and his little concrete shed of a church, oversimple, rocked with some amplified Argentine song. It had been whispered to me that the priest came of a very good family; and perhaps the change of company had made him vain. He was of course a Peronist, and he said that all his Indians were Peronist. “Only an Argentine can understand Peronism. I can talk to you for five years about Peronism, but you will never understand.”

But couldn’t we try? He said Peronism wasn’t concerned with economic growth; they rejected the consumer society. But hadn’t he just been complaining about the unemployment in the interior, the result of government folly, that was sending two Indians into his shantytown for every one that left? He said he wasn’t going to waste his time talking to a norteamericano; some people were concerned only with GNP. And, leaving us, he bore down, all smiles, on some approaching Indians. The river wind was damp, the concrete shed unheated, and I wanted to leave. But the man with me was uneasy. He said we should at least wait and tell the father I wasn’t an American. We did so. And the father, abashed, explained that Peronism was really concerned with the development of the human spirit. Such a development had taken place in Cuba and China; in those countries they had turned their backs on the industrial society.

Recall what Bernie said about Cuba.

The people we met had an almost religious affection for [Fidel Castro]. The revolution there is far deep and more profound than I understood it to be. It really is a revolution in terms of values.”

Muddle-headed Bernie echoes a muddle-headed priest from the aristocracy. Both full of fantasies about totalitarian communist dictators.

The muddle-headed priest ended up going the guerrilla route, and was killed in combat. Two decades later, Naipual met one of his acolytes. (Parents of a childhood friend were friends with another aristocratic priest turned dead guerrilla- Camilo Torres.)

It doesn’t say much for Bernie Sanders that at times he sounds like a Liberation Theology priest.

Are you referring to Bernie’s calling Hugo Chávez a “communist dictator?” For decades, Bernie has had the warm fuzzies for “communist dictators” like Daniel Ortega and Fidel Castro. As I have already given sufficient evidence of Bernie’s love for the Sandinistas in the 1980s, I will confine my comments here to Fidel Castro.
Bernie Sanders of Democratic Socialism fame has done his fair share of defending Totalitarian Socialism as practiced in Cuba. For example: When Bernie Sanders Thought Castro and the Sandinistas Could Teach America a Lesson.

Sanders had a hunch that Cubans actually appreciated living in a one-party state. “The people we met had an almost religious affection for [Fidel Castro]. The revolution there is far deep and more profound than I understood it to be. It really is a revolution in terms of values.”
It was a conclusion he had come to long before visiting the country. Years earlier Sanders said something similar during a press conference:
“You know, not to say Fidel Castro and Cuba are perfect—they are certainly not—but just because Ronald Reagan dislikes these people does not mean to say the people in these nations feel the same.”

There is, of course, a mechanism to measure the levels of popular content amongst the campesinos. Perhaps it’s too much to expect a democratic socialist to be familiar with the free election, a democratic nicety the Cuban government hasn’t availed itself of during its almost 60 years in power.

As Bernie has had a half century of being a fanboy of communist dictator Fidel, his calling someone a “communist dictator” is not, from Bernie’s point of view, necessarily a bad thing.

Venezuela’s Maduro: Brazil impeachment is a ‘coup’ that was ‘made in the USA’

Venezuela’s ruling Socialist Party has long been a strong ally of Rousseff’s Workers Party, especially during the rule of her predecessor Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.

“I have no doubt that behind this coup is the label ‘made in USA,'” President Nicolas Maduro said in a speech on state TV.

“Powerful oligarchic, media and imperial forces have decided to finish with the progressive forces, the popular revolutionary leaderships of the left in the continent,” he said.

Sanders Condemns Efforts to Remove Brazil’s Democratically Elected Presiden

BURLINGTON, Vt., August 8 – U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders on Monday issued the following statement calling on the United States to take a definitive stand against efforts to remove Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff from office:

“I am deeply concerned by the current effort to remove Brazil’s democratically elected president, Dilma Rousseff. To many Brazilians and observers the controversial impeachment process more closely resembles a coup d’état.

“After suspending Brazil’s first female president on dubious grounds, without a mandate to govern, the new interim government abolished the ministry of women, racial equality and human rights. They immediately replaced a diverse and representative administration with a cabinet made up entirely of white men. The new, unelected administration quickly announced plans to impose austerity, increase privatization and install a far right-wing social agenda.

“The effort to remove President Rousseff is not a legal trial but rather a political one. The United States cannot sit silently while the democratic institutions of one of our most important allies are undermined. We must stand up for the working families of Brazil and demand that this dispute be settled with democratic elections.”

Wiki: mpeachment of Dilma Rousseff

On 31 August 2016, the Senate removed President Rousseff from office by a 61–20 vote, finding her guilty of breaking Brazil’s budget laws. Accordingly, Temer was sworn in as the 37th President of Brazil

A 61-20 vote is a coup? Neither Bernie nor Maduro are fans of a 61-20 vote, as such a margin is prima facie evidence of a right wing minority oligarchy running things. 🙂

BTW, the “new, unelected” president was elected vice president on Dilma’s ticket. Why did Dilma have a “right winger” as her vice president? Whatya say, Bernie and Maduro?

Since you could basically interchange Bernie’s and Maduro’s statements on Dilma’s impeachment, that is evidence to me that they their thought patterns are rather similar.

My comment : August 16, 2018 at 12:04 pm at 12:04 pm.
Granted, Bernie merely posted a newspaper article on his Senate website, but his doing so implies approval of what it said.

Also thanks for the links. Read one of the three (on being “woke”) and found it quite fascinating.

I actually partly agree with some of the Gnostic observations; reality being “out there” and our perception of reality being self-specific and internal. My admittedly superficial observation is that the Gnostics see these things as changeable simply by changing their perception; for them perception is reality. Conversely, I see reality, “out there”, as something immune to change from simple observation; one can change the word “down” to mean “up” but that doesn’t change the direction that water flows. You can invent a thousand genders as evidence of your freedom and “wokeness” but that doesn’t change the fact that there are only two sex-specific types of human beings. Thus, we perceive reality but reality is not real because of our perceptions, it is real because it is real; it is a tautology. To paraphrase that great philosopher Popeye: it is what it is and that’s all that it is.

This, I think, is where the Gnostics and the Progressives fail completely. It helps to remember that the Progressives think they are evolving toward establishing a Utopia; in other words, Progressives want to create a “No Place”, a place that doesn’t and that can’t exist.

Given a chance, Bernie Sanders and his ilk would do exactly the same for the U.S. that Hugo Chavez did for Venezuela. I have lived in Venezuela for the last 12 years, a witness to the slow motion train wreck this formerly beautiful country has experienced. Believe me when I tell you that you really don’t want to experience this first hand.
* **
Thanks for the report from the field.
That’s one of the things I love about Neo’s blog & commentators.

PS I used to employ the term “commentariat” for the blog-reading community, but in the context of the post and the realization that “-ariat” is a distinctly Soviet terminology, I looked it up: the common use is to designate the members of the media pundocracy as a class, with connotations of power and influence that we obviously don’t have. In this era of fake news, a Soviet-style label is particularly appropriate.