Dark duos: Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre

The New Neo Posted on by

Simone de Beauvoir and her even-more-famous lover Jean-Paul Sartre, darlings of feminists and the left, were loathsome characters in their personal lives as well in their politics, despite the heroic and self-aggrandizing legends they took great pains to establish.

When it first came out I tried to read a 2009 book called A Dangerous Liaison, a joint biography of the two and their relationship. It was slow going, and ultimately I could only bear to read a small portion of it, and skipped around to read smaller sections a bit at a time, finally abandoning it and going for a book review instead.

The book was meticulously researched and sourced; that wasn’t the trouble. It was almost literally unreadable because the story of the two and their twisted (a word that’s exceptionally apropos) relationship was simply too abhorrent and repellent to voluntarily wallow in.

Here are some facts about those giants of philosophy, wonderful examples of personal freedom and love without the shackles of conventional commitment, that independent feminist and her thinking man (remember, also that this review appeared in the Guardian, not known for its conservatism) [emphasis mine]:

Having got the business of God out of the way with precocious ease before they hit puberty (for de Beauvoir, He ‘ceased to exist’ at secondary school; for Sartre, God ‘vanished without explanation’ when he was 12), they launched themselves into a vortex of depravity with all the alacrity of teenagers breaking a parental curfew…

For five decades, they pursued an open partnership that allowed them to engage in ‘contingent’ relationships with others…They hoped to devise new ways of living in a godless world, unrestricted by detested bourgeois institutions. But, in reality, [biographer] Seymour-Jones demonstrates that their quest became a darker, more collusive joint enterprise through the 51 years of their partnership, with deeply unpleasant consequences for those who found themselves towed under by the viscous currents of the Sartrean ‘family’.

De Beauvoir became a glorified procuress, exploiting her profession as a teacher to seduce impressionable female pupils and then passing them on to Sartre, who had a taste for virgins. One of them, Olga Kosakiewicz, was so unbalanced by the experience that she started to self-harm. In 1938, the 30-year-old de Beauvoir seduced her student Bianca Bienenfeld. A few months later, Sartre slept with the 16-year-old Bianca in a hotel room, telling her that the chambermaid would be surprised as he had already taken another girl’s virginity the same day…

Sartre’s seemingly illogical devotion to the Soviet Union in later life is thus viewed through the prism of his passionate affair with Lena Zonina, who was almost certainly a KGB agent. His love of communism was also a replacement for Christianity. However hard Sartre tried to reconcile his devotion to individual freedom with the cyclical view of history perpetrated by Marxism, he never quite convinced his critics, among them Albert Camus. Sartre’s protestation that we should ‘judge communism by its intentions and not by its actions’ seemed grotesque in the face of between 15 and 30 million deaths in the gulag.

But it is in her depiction of de Beauvoir that Seymour-Jones really hits her stride. Although de Beauvoir believed that her relationship with Sartre was ‘the one undoubted success of my life’, Seymour-Jones gently scratches at the varnish of this statement until it flakes off like gilt from an icon. The appearance of unity was only achieved at the cost of de Beauvoir’s emotional unravelling.

The story goes on—and on—and on, a descent into a cesspool of human exploitation and, yes, evil. That these two are still lionized anywhere is an abomination, in part because one can’t look at their intellectual achievements as separate from their private lives. They wanted their lives to be examples of the strength of their philosophy, and they are—only that strength has an opposite valence from the myth they tried to erect (to a certain extent their effort to whitewash their lives was successful, though; witness how few people seem to know this story).

Another review of the book states it quite well:

Ever since their deaths in the 1980s, six years apart, there has been a seepage of disclosure and reappraisal. We have learnt the extent to which this equivocating pair were Communist fellow-travellers for a full decade after the revelations of Stalinist brutalities and the Hungarian uprising destroyed the myth for all but the most bigoted party members. We have learnt how they failed to play any significant part in wartime resistance, but managed to create a subsequent impression that they had been in on it all. Even more tellingly, we have become aware of a bubbling stew of resentment, accusations and conflicting interests and of the existence of adopted heirs (one his and one hers) squabbling over personal papers. There must, one felt, have been something amiss with the structure of their legendary and much-vaunted free union, and with their whole notion of ‘contingent’ attachments around the central one, if it all ended so squalidly – and so drenched in pills and alcohol.

Just how far the Sartre-Beauvoir compact became a travesty of all their claims to honesty and freedom now becomes clear in this excoriating study. Carole Seymour-Jones has gained the confidence of Beauvoir’s ‘daughter’ and literary executor, and has had access to hitherto unknown letters that Beauvoir had declared to be lost; she has also got on the track of the Russian interpreter for whom the 56-year-old Sartre naively hoped to ditch Beauvoir, and of this woman’s KGB handler. She has talked to the Jewish protégée whom Beauvoir abandoned during the war, and to others in the harem (‘the family’) of inadequate women that Sartre maintained to bolster his fragile self-esteem. She tracks Beauvoir’s agonies of unreconstructed female jealousy through her letters and journals, agonies that of course she expunged from her published memoirs but which appear tellingly in her fiction. We also hear about the clandestine affair that Beauvoir maintained for many years with the pliable husband of Olga, another member of the ‘family’. Seymour-Jones’s account is indefatigably detailed and even-handed. She has mastered a great deal of French political life over many decades. She claims, in her introduction, still to admire her main subjects. One wonders how she manages to…

There is a telling moment, halfway through the book, when the author describes her two central figures as ‘glued together by their lies’. She is referring to their shifty repositioning of themselves in the years after the Occupation, but the phrase might stand equally as an epitaph for their entire life together.

Truth is so different from the fiction that the mind stands in awe of the breadth of the Orwellian reversal.

None other than Nietzsche foresaw something of the sort years earlier when he wrote “If God is dead, all is permitted.”

For centuries, the idea of God had provided a metaphysical underpinning for moral values. Without this underpinning, Nietzsche surmised, the moral values of mainstream society would eventually come to seem arbitrary and false. Already, in Nietzsche’s time, leading thinkers were questioning core values that had maintained the social order for centuries. Darwin, Marx and Dostoyevsky were discussing morality in evolutionary, economic and existential terms. Soon, morality would be revealed for what it truly was: a human invention.

What then, Nietzsche wondered? Nihilism, he answered in his final books. ”˜What does nihilism mean? The highest values devalue themselves. The aim is lacking; “why” finds no answer’ (The Will to Power, §2). If God is dead, everything is permitted.

De Beauvoir and Sartre lived it out, feeding on each other—and off of others more innocent than they—in the process.

On an individual level, not all atheists live the way de Beauvoir and Sartre did, of course. Most live quite moral lives. Nor are the lives of all believers morally exemplary. But a society that abandons the general underpinnings of its moral code, and one that celebrates lives such as de Beauvoir’s and Sartre’s, is in big, big trouble.

[ADDENDUM: I thought I’d add some details I wrote in a comment. Sartre and de Beauvoir didn’t just seduce underage women, although that would be bad enough. They seduced her students, which was also a perversion and betrayal of her status as teacher, and she usually began it and then handed them over to him. They toyed with their feelings and abandoned them at some point after the girls had become emotionally dependent on them, causing even greater emotional harm. And if I recall correctly, Sartre and de Beauvoir could not have cared less.

More here [emphasis mine]:

…[O]n October 1, 1929, Sartre suggested their famous pact: they would have a permanent ‘essential’ love.

They would sleep together and have affairs on the side which they must describe to each other in every intimate detail.

During the first years, Sartre embarked on the arrangement with gusto. He liked to sleep with virgins, after which he rapidly lost interest.

This left the highly sexed Simone, now teaching philosophy, constantly frustrated, despite the lovers she took.

It was when she developed a relationship with one of her young female pupils that the first of her love triangles with Sartre came about.

When Sartre had a breakdown after experimenting with hallucinogenic drugs, Simone asked her new lover to nurse him.

But she was not prepared for the crippling jealousy she felt when Sartre tried to seduce not only the girl but her younger sister as well.

Simone’s reaction to Sartre’s faithlessness was to sleep with another of her pupils, and when Sartre retaliated by deflowering another virgin, Simone pinched her lover’s 21-year-old boyfriend.

If this couple expected their arrangement would spare them the trials and heartache of a conventional marriage, they were wrong.

Their multiple affairs went on until World War II when Sartre was called up and their sex games had to be conducted through letters.

Left behind in Paris, Simone continued to seduce both men and women, writing titillating descriptions of her activities to Sartre behind the Maginot Line, which reveal her heartlessness and the vulnerability of her conquests…

Tragically, the lives of these girls, who were pathologically jealous of each other over their teacher’s attentions, were permanently blighted.

One took to self-harming, another committed suicide. Most remained pathetically unfulfilled and dependent on the childless Simone, who perversely referred to them as her ‘family’.

Yet Simone had no maternal feelings for them at all. She showed no empathy even when one of them, a Jewish girl whom she seduced when she was 16, nearly lost her life at the hands of the Nazis who were advancing on Paris.

Much much more at the link, all of it abominable.]

[ADDENDUM II: By the way, I happened to go to the Wiki page of de Beauvoir and that of Sartre. There is a very brief mention of open relationships, and on de Beauvoir’s page there is a very short discussion of her relationship with two students. It doesn’t even remotely begin to express what was going on and how pervasive it was. I’m all for “innocent till proven guilty,” but de Beauvoir’s and Sartre’s own letters to each other fully describe the scope and depth of their depravity. Her Wiki page nearly ignores it, and his ignores it totally as far as I can see, despite being very lengthy.]

Worthy work: the National Association of Scholars

The New Neo Posted on by

The National Association of Scholars is, in its own words:

…a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization that seeks to reform higher education. We uphold the standards of a liberal arts education that fosters intellectual freedom, searches for the truth, and promotes virtuous citizenship. To accomplish this mission we defend the academic freedom of faculty members, students, and others through individual advocacy; investigate issues affecting academic freedom, the integrity, purpose, and neutrality of the university and publish our findings as in-depth reports; educate the public about policies and legislation that would preserve the liberal arts and protect academic freedom. These create three pillars from which our work stands: individual advocacy, research reports, and public advocacy.

I suggest you explore their website and consider supporting them. It can be hard to figure out a way to help stem the tide of leftist dominance of education, but feeling defeated and giving up doesn’t seem to me to be the answer. The NAS is fighting back.

I’ve mentioned the group in previous posts, here and here.

Yesterday I was reminded of the group through this comment on the blog by Professor Jay Bergman. I reproduce most of it here; the subject of the thread was the adoption by many school systems of the NY Times’ 1619 Project as part of their curriculum:

This grotesque distortion of American history, meant to demonstrate its irredeemable iniquity, has been rejected publicly and at some length by the National Association of Scholars, on whose board of directors I am pleased and proud to serve. Its research director, David Randall, has produced an incisive and eloquent rebuttal, which is accessible at: https://www.nas.org/blogs/article/how-the-times-1619-project-misses-the-point.

NAS seeks to uphold the liberal arts and a liberal education. In so doing, it regularly exposes the pernicious idiocies that have corrupted American academia. NAS can be contacted online at contact@nas.org and by telephone (917-551-6770).

Anyone in academia who is presently “out” as a defender of these traditions is a courageous and hardy person, swimming against a strong tide. It takes a lot of strength to do that, but it’s very important work.

Iowa caucus conspiracies

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s the perfect situation for the incubation of conspiracies.

First, we have a process that few people understand in the first place: the Iowa caucuses.

Next, we have a contentious race, many candidates (adding to the complexity), and a residue of distrust from the campaigns in 2016 and even earlier.

Then, we have a nearly-unprecented intensity on the part of Democrats to beat the evil Trump.

Lastly, we have a truly epic snafu and excuses that don’t really explain much of anything.

Is anyone – except the announced winner, when one finally emerges – going to accept and trust the results? Of course not. And this will further poison an already-tense race among the Democrats. I don’t know whether what’s happening in Iowa will ultimately matter much in terms of picking a nominee, but it certainly sets a tone of incompetence and/or corruption (fools or knaves, as it were).

Who to blame? Apps? Organizers? Clinton’s people? One of the candidates? Perhaps my favorite is this:

Because of course we all know that Russia would rather Trump get elected than Bernie.

Could Sanders win?

The New Neo Posted on by

The nomination? The presidency?

Many Democrats seem to be frightened in a way similar to how a lot of Republicans felt during the 2016 campaign when Trump’s star was rising. The Democrats’ main fear is that Sanders cannot win against an opponent they hate and passionately desire to oust. For the Democrats, that opponent is of course Trump. For the Republicans in 2016, it was Hillary Clinton.

Trump won. Could Sanders? I think it would be an utter disaster for the country, but could he?

Polls at this point don’t matter. So no one really knows. I submit in evidence of the possibility of his winning the nomination (and even, perhaps, the whole shebang) the fact that a heretofore fairly moderate Democrat friend of mine announced that she is a Bernie supporter. This surprised me, and I haven’t yet had a chance to ask her why, but I plan to do so because I really would like to know the answer. And I assume she knows what Sanders stands for and approves, because she is a follower of political news (although her main source is CNN).

I don’t think Sanders can win the presidency. But plenty of things I didn’t think could happen have indeed happened. So my prediction at this point is worth just about nothing. And it’s not reassuring to think that no one else’s opinion is worth much more than that.

But I will say this: those who are worried that Sanders is leading in New Hampshire may be forgetting that New Hampshire Democrats are fond of Sanders. Is it because Vermont is so close, although the two states are quite different in their makeup? After all, as I pointed out here, New Englanders have a history of leaning towards other New Englanders in primaries (Sanders isn’t a native, of course, but he’s been in Vermont a long long time).

At any rate, in 2016 Sanders defeated Hillary 60% to 38%. That’s quite impressive in terms of showing what sort of support Bernie has among Democrats in New Hampshire, although I don’t think he’ll win New Hampshire by that sort of margin this time. After all, there are a great many more candidates running. But I do think he’ll win the NH primary in 2020, and it should be no surprise.

But – as was true in 2016 – what happens in New Hampshire does not a trend make, although it showed his strength even back then. And it is interesting to speculate what would have happened in 2016 had the party powers not intervened to stop him, via the superdelegates (although there’s disagreement about how much of an effect that actually had; perhaps it didn’t really matter). It is apparent, however, that Sanders came surprisingly close to being nominated in 2016.

If you believe that polls matter at this point (and I don’t), these 2020 poll results for a Sanders vs. Trump battle are very disturbing. That so many people are all-too-willing to vote for a lifelong Socialist who happens to be 78 and will be 79 at the time of an election (and has already had a heart attack on the campaign trail), is immensely depressing. But at this point it should not be surprising. Trump-hatred and the Gramscian march fully explain it.

I think it’s always dangerous to wish for the Democrats to nominate their most radical candidates because we might think they are almost certain to be defeated. I don’t see Sanders as certain to be defeated at all, although I think his support should be at about 2%. But it is much much greater than that. Of course, Sanders is not the only one whose policies are dangerous. But he seems to be the most charismatic, and although I fail to understand that appeal, it is undeniably present.

Superbowl 2020: good clean fun for the whole family

The New Neo Posted on by

I cared even less about this year’s Superbowl than I usually do – and since I usually don’t care, that means I didn’t bother to turn on the TV. But I know many people do care, so here’s a thread in case you want to talk about it.

What I have seen a lot of discussion about is not the game, but the halftime entertainment, and the consensus is that it was an empty, sad, soft-porn, would-be-titillating mess. Ace – not known for puritanism – has this take on it (and a video of the proceedings can be found here). I only watched about a minute or so because it both bores and saddens me that this is what entertainment – “family” entertainment? – has come to.

But Jeb Bush loved it. Go figure. Is he planning another campaign, or is this the inner Jeb Bush finally coming out?

The halftime act made me think about some of the writings of Allan Bloom, and I was all set to write a long post linking the empty sex demonstration of the halftime show to some of Bloom’s much older critiques of rock and roll. But a faint bell of familiarity starting ringing in my head, and it occurred to me that I might be repeating myself.

And sure enough, when I did a search on the blog, I discovered that I had passed this way before, back in September of 2015. And so without further ado I will repeat the post I wrote then, which constitutes the rest of this post.

I’m a little late to this party, but I wanted to say a few words about the Chrissie Hynde brouhaha:

…Chrissie Hynde has waded into another contentious area ”“ the overly sexualised nature of modern pop music.

In an obvious reference to scantily-clad stars such as Miley Cyrus and Rihanna, the former Pretenders lead singer branded them ”˜sex workers’ for selling music by ”˜bumping and grinding’ in their underwear. The 64-year-old also accused them of doing ”˜a great deal of damage’ to women with their risque performances…

Miss Hynde added: ”˜I don’t think sexual assault is a gender issue as such, I think it’s very much it’s all around us now.

”˜It’s provoked by this pornography culture, it’s provoked by pop stars who call themselves feminists. Maybe they’re feminists on behalf of prostitutes ”“ but they are no feminists on behalf of music, if they are selling their music by bumping and grinding and wearing their underwear in videos.

”˜That’s a kind of feminism ”“ but, you know, you’re a sex worker is what you are.’

There are two messages here. One is that today’s female pop stars go so far in their sexual come-ons, and their scanty dress, that they effectively are porn stars of the soft-core variety. The second is that this behavior creates an atmosphere that provokes and increases sexual assault.

I pretty much agree with the first. I’m not at all sure about the second, and it’s a subject so vast (what encourages sexual assaults and what decreases them, and also how broadly one should define the term “sexual assault) that I’m going to shelve it for now and concentrate instead on the first.

Over the years I’ve watched pop music degrade to the point that it’s so sexually explicit as to be virtually indistinguishable from what was considered to be soft-porn entertainment in my youth. That sort of thing is now mainstream, accepted, and even considered by many feminists to be empowering. Who was the entertainer who made it that way—Madonna (whom I’ve always found coldly repellent—but then again, I’m neither a heterosexual male nor a lesbian woman, nor even a gay guy)? Whoever it was, it’s in full flower now, and even pre-pubescents get to watch, right in the comfort of their own homes.

When I read what Hynde had said, I immediately thought of Allan Bloom’s 1987 book The Closing of the American Mind (not necessarily an obvious segue, I know). The book has long been one of my favorites, and I’ve written about it and recommended it many times, usually in the context of a discussion of education (especially colleges) and PC thought, and the takeover of the university by special interest groups.

Bloom’s book was focused on the university and its effect on our society. In fact, it’s subtitle was “How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students.” You can see the emphasis on colleges, but what is sometimes lost is the second half of the subtitle, the part about impoverishing the souls. In the service of that idea, Bloom mounted an attack on rock and roll music, a critique I thought odd at the time I first read it, and which I haven’t discussed much on this blog when I’ve written about him because it hasn’t been relevant. Now I look back on it and I think I understand better what he was getting at:

Civilization…is the taming or domestication of the soul’s raw passions—not suppressing or excising them, which would deprive the soul of its energy—but forming and informing them as art…Music, or poetry…always involves a delicate balance between passion and reason, and even in its highest and most developed forms—religious, warlike, and erotic—that balance is always tipped, if ever so slightly, towards the passionate. Music, as everyone experiences, provides an unquestionable justification and a fulfilling pleasure for the activities it accompanies: the soldier who hears the marching band is enthralled and reassured; the religious man is exalted in his prayer by the sound of the organ in the church; and the lover is carried away and his conscience stilled by the romantic guiter. Armed with music, man can damn rational doubt. Out of the music emerge the gods that suit it, and they educate men by their example and their commandments….

[Rock music] has risen to its current heights in the education of the young on the ashes of classical music, and in an atmosphere in which there is no intellectual resistance to attempts to tap the rawest passions…[R]ock music has one appeal only, a barbaric appeal, to sexual desire—not love, not eros, but sexual desire undeveloped and untutored. It acknowledges the first emanations of children’s emerging sexuality and addresses them seriously, eliciting them and legitimizing them, not as little sprouts that must be carefully tended in order to grow into gorgeous flowers, but as the real thing. Rock gives children, on a silver platter, with all the public authority of the entertainment industry, everything their parents always used to tell them they had to wait for until they grew up and would understand later…

…[A]n enormous industry cultivates the taste for the orgiastic state of feeling connected with sex, providing a constant flow of fresh material for voracious appetites…

I could go on and on and on quoting Bloom, but I’ll stop there and just say you should read the book, or reread it (Bloom has a whole chapter entitled “Music,” from which I got those quotes). He further ties the sexuality fostered by rock music, and the rebellion against parents and authority that it both reflects and engenders, as generalizing to a more blanket condemnation of parents, authority, tradition, and society, and also to the embrace of leftism: “From love comes hate, masquerading as social reform…In short, life is made into a nonstop, commercially prepackaged masturbational fantasy.”

Bloom’s book was published in 1987, and it was based on his lectures and notes that in some cases were even older. The rock music of that time was chaste compared to that of today (and much of the music was better, too, IMHO). Going back even further, the rock music of my 50s/60s youth was, comparatively speaking, a celebration of puppy love (“I Want to Hold Your Hand”). And yet it contained the seeds of the blatant and loveless sexuality we see today.

I like quite a bit of pop music, especially the music of my youth. However, I find today’s explicit and coarse sexuality in music, that Hynde deplores and blames—and that Bloom already seemed to foresee, although I wonder whether even he would have been stunned by how far it’s come so fast—deplorable. But I’m not the demographic it’s appealing to, and that demographic celebrates and is affected, influenced, and shaped by it.

[NOTE: And yes, the left intends these developments, which suit their purposes admirably.]

[NOTE II: See also this about the 2020 halftime show.]

That pas de deux: a few telling moments

The New Neo Posted on by

Commenter “AesopFan” had this to say about a very short passage within the “Agon” pas de deux we discussed a while ago:

There is a small section that I noticed has different movements in the two samples.

The woman, in front, slips backwards between the man’s legs, lifts her legs in a wide V, then he pulls her up again…

I liked the original much better, although I don’t know that I have the words to say why. Both are very expressive and fluid, but the first seemed more connected.

Well, I believe I can tell you why you thought the original was more connected.

But first watch the passage in the original, and then in the newer production. It’s very short, just a few seconds really. You can even set it to slow motion if you’d like, and if you want to make it full screen go right ahead. But don’t blink, or you may miss it:

So, why would AesopFan feel them to be more connected in the original version? Because they are more connected.

In the first few seconds of the first clip, as the woman (Diana Adams) slides downward towards a seated position, she holds her torso – her back and her head – against Arthur Mitchell’s torso (his front). She seems a bit stuck to him in some way and slightly reluctant to move. There is resistance to getting down on the floor. She appears conflicted; perhaps with a “should I stay or should I go?” feeling. But the woman in the other couple (Maria Kowroski) is just moving quickly and effortlessly downwards. Although she’s holding onto his arms, she’s otherwise doing it totally on her own. We have no idea why she’s going downwards, or what the relationship might be between these two people.

Then, after each woman goes backwards into a split while reclining on her back, Diana Adams performs her split with some resistance and less ease, whereas Kowroski is once again merely showing us how tremendously flexible she is.

But it’s the next part that’s more telling. Each man leans waaaayy back to grab his partner’s hands and hoist her up onto her feet again. But by the time Mitchell reaches back, most of Adams’ body is still reclining, so that the backwards-leaning Mitchell really is pulling her right off the floor, propelling her forward with his power. They are connected, and she is somewhat dependent on him – although she seems somewhat desirous of being pulled.

In contrast, Kowroski is almost completely autonomous. She gets up mostly under her own steam. Why is her partner even bothering to lean all the way back? She does lean on him just a bit as she gets up, using him rather like the armrests on a chair. That’s about all he seems to be to her. The entire sequence has lost or changed its meaning because of the slight change in movement and emphasis. Why are they going down and up again; why should we care? But we don’t know what’s missing unless we’ve seen it done differently, and even then it goes so quickly and smoothly that a viewer might have trouble, just as AesopFan did, explaining why he or she feels a bit flat about it.

And that’s just a few seconds’ worth of the pas de deux. The entire ballet is like that. The differences are small but profound, and the feelings they evoke in the audience are different. I suspect it not only reflects differences in dance, dance directors, and dancers themselves, as well as what audiences have come to expect, but it expresses a difference in the idea of relationships between men and women in 1957 (when the piece was first performed) and now.

“It wasn’t a real trial so it’s illegitimate and Trump is still guilty”…

The New Neo Posted on by

…is one of the more bizarre of the Democrats’ criticisms of the goings-on in the Senate, if you go by the laws of logic. Impeachment trials use the word “trial” as a sort of shorthand for some sort of legal proceeding, but it is not one that is constrained by all the procedural paraphernalia of an ordinary trial – including the rules of evidence.

The Democrats believe they can pretend otherwise. The reason is quite simple: they want to say it doesn’t count and Trump is still guilty, as “proven” in their own investigation and witness-questioning that followed none, and I mean none, of the protective rules involved in a trial. They want to pick and choose what parts of a trial they require Republicans to follow in the Senate, and what parts Democrats can ignore in the House (and the Senate, too, if the Democrats ever got a chance to interrogate witnesses there, too).

This serves to set up the Democrats’ continual, perpetual bleat of “he’s guilty forever, he will never be unimpeached” – although in accomplishing this supposed feat the Democrats violated the due process they insist that Republicans must follow in the Senate “trial” portion of the proceedings.

Doris Lessing, changer

The New Neo Posted on by

Doris Lessing was a well-known writer who died in 2013 after a very long life and many prizes, including a Nobel. I confess that I’ve never read a thing she wrote, although I tried a few times. It just didn’t grab me, and I don’t even remember why. But this post isn’t about her novels – it’s about her political beliefs, which I find of interest.

Lessing began as a committed leftist, a Communist. She also was a feminist, and I believe she remained so in one way or another for her entire life. But in many ways she thought for herself and quite early on understood the danger represented by PC thought. She left the hard left quite early on, as well.

Here are some interesting quotes from this article in November, 1997:

Lessing: Capitalism was dead [postwar 40s and 50s in England]. It was done and finished. And the future was socialist or communist. We were going to have justice, equality, fair pay for women, cripples, blacks — everything, in a very short time. This nonsense was believed by extremely intelligent people.

Question: You call these beliefs a kind of mass hypnosis.

Lessing: I call it mass psychopathology. Because what we believed was rubbish. It had absolutely nothing to do with what was going on in the world.

Question: But it was such a heady kind of belief, wasn’t it? Was it truly all rubbish?

Lessing: Look, most of it was rubbish. But it had an enormous emotional charge behind it, which meant that people could achieve more if they believed this kind of thing. You know, if you are fueled by this pure belief, amazing things get done.

Question: You write about all of these interesting, caring, passionate people who put so much work into their belief in communism, and what they got in return was Stalin. It was a cruel kind of a joke.

Lessing: Well, that’s why socialism is, for our time, dead. Because young people say, “Right, all you Reds — look what you were supporting. China and the Soviet Union.” The interesting thing is to ask yourself this question: Why were the Europeans bothered about the Soviet Union at all? It was nothing to do with us. China had nothing to do with us. Why were we not building, without reference to the Soviet Union, a good society in our own countries? But no, we were all — in one way or another — obsessed with the bloody Soviet Union, which was a disaster. What people were supporting was failure. And continually justifying it. That had a disastrous effect on — this is another cliche, forgive me — progressive thinking of every kind.

I think she sees it somewhat clearly in some ways, but in others she connects the failure with Stalin and Communism rather than something inherent to leftism. In the 90s, when she gave this interview, young people were more aware of the Soviet Union and its horrors. It was recent, and the fall of the USSR was recent and within their experience and memory. Nowadays “young people” seem to either have no clue what happened then and earlier, or to know about them and to figure they will avoid them when they get the power, or to be drawn to repeating those horrors because they regard them as an important and necessary tool to be used by the left for control.

More:

Question: You compare that kind o[f progressive thinking to today’s political correctness, to use another cliche. How true is that?

Lessing: I think it is true. I think the attitudes of mind behind it are the same.

Question: What are those attitudes?

Lessing: A need to oversimplify. To control. And an enormous distrust of the innovative, of new ideas. All political movements are like this — we are in the right, everyone else is in the wrong. The people on our own side who disagree with us are heretics, and they start becoming enemies. With it comes an absolute conviction of your own moral superiority. There’s oversimplification in everything, and a terror of flexibility. This characterizes political correctness.

Question: Your book is, in many ways, about falling out of love with communism….

Lessing: This process was going on right from the beginning. I’m talking about the Soviet Union — people seeing what it was like and leaving. Everywhere you went you met people who had been communists and understood perfectly well the perils of the dream, and were now angry with themselves for falling for it. I think [this interest in communism] was rooted in the First World War and people’s passionate identification with what had been done to the soldiers, which crossed all the national boundaries. I think that’s where a disgust and contempt for government began, at the level we see it now. The automatic reaction of practically any young person is, at once, against authority. That, I think, began in the First World War because of the trenches, and the incompetence of the people on all fronts. I think that a terrible bitterness and anger began there, which led to communism. And now it feeds terrorism [I don’t think shes talking about Islamic terrorism here]. Anyway, that’s my thesis. It’s very oversimplified, as you can see…

Question: On the subject of feminism, let me ask a different question. You’ve written that women seem to be much more easily shocked these days.

Lessing: Yes, they are. Almost as a political intention, they’re shocked. I can’t remember ever being shocked if someone exposed himself, or made a pass which I though was inept. I’d just go, “Well, that’s life.” But now, it’s a whole political agenda.

Question: The sudden vogue of sexual harassment, you mean?

Lessing: Well, I’m not saying this isn’t serious, obviously I’m not. That’s the difficulty of this discussion, because I don’t want to sound unsympathetic to women who are sexually harassed, because I know they are. But I think a great many women complain about sexual harassment when it’s nothing of the kind. It’s just one of the minor annoyances of life. When a little boy kisses a little girl at school and it becomes a national issue, what can we say about this? It’s just such lunacy.

Remember, that was in 1997. And then in August 2001 Lessing gave this talk at the Edinburgh Book Festival. Oh, can you imagine? Someone should go to every book festival in the world and just re-read it:

The novelist Doris Lessing yesterday claimed that men were the new silent victims in the sex war, “continually demeaned and insulted” by women without a whimper of protest.

Lessing, who became a feminist icon with the books The Grass is Singing and The Golden Notebook, said a “lazy and insidious” culture had taken hold within feminism that revelled in flailing men.

Young boys were being weighed down with guilt about the crimes of their sex, she told the Edinburgh book festival, while energy which could be used to get proper child care was being dissipated in the pointless humiliation of men.

“I find myself increasingly shocked at the unthinking and automatic rubbishing of men which is now so part of our culture that it is hardly even noticed,” the 81-year-old Persian-born writer said yesterday…

“We have many wonderful, clever, powerful women everywhere, but what is happening to men? Why did this have to be at the cost of men?

“I was in a class of nine- and 10-year-olds, girls and boys, and this young woman was telling these kids that the reason for wars was the innately violent nature of men.

“You could see the little girls, fat with complacency and conceit while the little boys sat there crumpled, apologising for their existence, thinking this was going to be the pattern of their lives.”

Lessing said the teacher tried to “catch my eye, thinking I would approve of this rubbish”.

She added: “This kind of thing is happening in schools all over the place and no one says a thing.

“It has become a kind of religion that you can’t criticise because then you become a traitor to the great cause, which I am not.

“It is time we began to ask who are these women who continually rubbish men. The most stupid, ill-educated and nasty woman can rubbish the nicest, kindest and most intelligent man and no one protests.

“Men seem to be so cowed that they can’t fight back, and it is time they did.”

That was almost twenty years ago.

The left announces the death of the Republican Party – again

The New Neo Posted on by

On MSNBC, for example:

That was apparently today. I would like to find the segment that followed, but in a quick search I haven’t been able to do so. However, it’s not hard to imagine how it would go, and how different it is from the way the right sees it.

Of course, I’m not sure the left really sees it that way; perhaps they merely want their viewers to see it that way. It’s all about the narrative for the left, after all, and they believe their words can create a reality. And they do create that reality in the minds of a lot of people – I know some of those people – with the result (an intended result) that when actual reality contradicts the narrative, and the right wins an election as happened in 2016, the next narrative is already fully in place: the right only won because it cheated and the winner is therefore illegitimate and must be vilified and if possible removed.

This “death of the Republican Party” business is hardly new. Just do a search on YouTube, for example, and you’ll find a bunch of older videos such as the following three. The first and third are from about a year ago. The second is from about two months ago. (And apparently you have to go to YouTube to warch the first one, for some reason. The segment I’m talking about begins around 1:20.):

And then there’s this article from February of 2016, during the campaign.

In my gloomiest days I think they may be right about the party’s death, although not for the reasons they give and not because they have something better to offer. What they offer is much, much worse. But they might be correct that the right is not going to prevail for the simple reason that the Gramscian march through the institutions by the left is highly advanced and may already have done the right – and liberty – a fatal blow.

But that’s by no means certain. And I fervently hope it’s incorrect.

What I think is almost certainly correct is that they are mourning the demise of the pushover, gentlemanly GOP. They could count on the majority of Republicans in leadership to be of that ilk, and that was a big part of the left’s calculation when strategizing. However, I have to be careful about that, too, because I seem to recall a period during the 90s when a more pugnacious group of Republicans was in charge (“Contract With America”), and ultimately they got pushed out. They lacked the populist touch and wider appeal of Trump, however.

The Democrats’ race to the left: Warren, Pelosi, and company

The New Neo Posted on by

Elizabeth Warren’s attempt to out-leftist Bernie Sanders.has her leaping over several sharks in a row with plenty of room to spare.

First, she goes for the 9-year-old-trans vote:

During a campaign event in Iowa Sunday, Warren said “a young trans person [had] asked about a welcoming community and I said, ‘It starts with the Secretary of Education, who has a lot to do with where we spend our money’ … and I said, ‘I’m going to have a Secretary of Education that this young trans person interviews on my behalf,'”

She added that “only if this person believes that our Secretary of Education nominee is committed to creating a welcoming environment, a safe environment, and a full educational curriculum for everyone, will that person be advanced to actually be Secretary of Education.”

It’s unclear who exactly Warren was referring to but a 9-year-old who identifies as transgender previously asked Warren what she would do in her “first week as president to make sure kids like me feel safer in school.”

Second, she insults and attempts to humiliate Chief Justice Roberts:

Even the abominable Schiff tried to backpedal from what the abominable Warren had done, adding: “I think the chief justice has presided admirably.”

Speaking of abominable and races to the left, we have Nancy Pelosi:

Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) on Thursday hammered the lawyers leading President Trump’s impeachment defense, saying they’ve trampled on the Constitution while questioning how they’ve been allowed to keep their licenses.

“I don’t know how they can retain their lawyer status, in the comments that they’re making,” Pelosi told reporters in the Capitol.

Pelosi was responding largely to comments made Wednesday evening by Alan Dershowitz, a celebrity lawyer on Trump’s legal team, who asserted on the Senate floor that presidents cannot be impeached for actions designed to boost their reelections — if they believe that retaining a grip on the White House is in the best interest of the country. And “every public official I know,” he added, considers that to be the case.

That’s the Hill reporter in that last paragraph in the quote – mischaracterizing what Dershowitz said, in the same way I’ve read it done almost countless times today. The party line is, as usual, to incorrectly paraphrase the argument in a way that makes it sound both absurd and dangerous. No way did Dershowitz say that, but the MSM and people like Pelosi count on the American public to either not have been watching or, if watching, to have not understood. So the left feels that it can characterize it any way they want, and to use selective quotes to “prove” their preferred narrative.

The thrust of Dersowitz’s remarks was that a president cannot and should not be impeached for having some political motives for an act that is otherwise legal and not a high crime and misdemeanor, as long as there is an arguable independent justification for that act. The Democrats distort this, of course, into “presidents cannot be impeached for actions designed to boost their reelections — if they believe that retaining a grip on the White House is in the best interest of the country.”

And that allows them to call Alan Dershowitz “Hitler”:

NN contributor Joe Lockhart, White House press secretary for President Bill Clinton, said Alan Dershowitz’s “public interest” argument against impeachment is something you would hear from Hilter, Mussolini, Stalin, and others who rationalized genocide.

“Having worked on about a dozen campaigns, there is always the sense that, ‘Boy, if we win, it’s better for the country. But that doesn’t give you license to commit crimes or to do things that are unethical. So, it was absurd,” Lockhart said Wednesday.

“What I thought when I was watching it was this is un-American,” Lockhart told CNN host Erin Burnett. “This is what you hear from Stalin. This is what you hear from Mussolini, what you hear from authoritarians, from Hitler, from all the authoritarian people who rationalized, in some cases genocide, based what was in the public interest.”

And yes, these people understand full well that they are distorting and misrepresenting what Dershowitz said.