Know any Gnostics?

TIK History: The cult many are in but don’t realize. He delves into Dialectical Materialism and Gnosticism; Marx and Hegel.

A half-century ago my philosophy professor said that Hegel described History as "God's Mind Marching Through Time." This means God could make a mistake and say, "Let's try that again, but with different people in charge." The class read Hegel with an English Translation on one page and an attempt to make sense of it (in English) on the facing page -- in this (at least to my 18-year-old brain), they failed.

Back in the 1960s I talked to Marxists in the Milltown I grew up in, and much of what they said didn't make sense. I assumed it resulted from a certain lack of theoretical sophistication in the provinces. Later, when I traveled some, I'd talked to Marxists who went to the Ivy League, Oxford/Cambridge and even the Sorbonne, and realized I'd done my hometown Marxists dirty -- they were totally up to speed.

Knowing Gnosticism

 TIK History: The REAL Religion Behind National Socialism is Gnosticism. TIK explains what that is.

To understand politics progressive politics you need to understand Gnosticism and what I call "the deeper truth" that only a select group can perceive and is unavailable to the ignorant masses.  It's OK to lie and distort when talking to the rubes, as long as those lies conform to "the deeper truth" and move events in the right direction. Framing Donald Trump as a Russian spy was not a lie, it was just a way of conveying the deeper truth that Donald Trump was a threat to the progressive movement that is "moving" to a better future. The frame job was a way of conveying that truth to the superstitious rabble, who suffer from false patriotism.  True American Patriots are not loyal to the flawed status quo but to a future America washed clean of the sins of the past and present.

The left will often champion people who are guilty of crimes.  This confused me for a time. Then I would learn that their reasoning for why the person should be set free was, well, esoteric. Finally, it occurred to me that anyone can rally around an innocent person but it will take a potential convert to the movement to promote the cause of the esoterically innocent -- in other words, when he really did shoot the deputy.

Scratch a Socialist and you'll likely find...

TIK has an interesting video on why Oswald Mosley turned to Fascism. 

You don't need to know much about Mosley or British history to get a better understanding of politics -- pretty much everywhere -- by watching it. For someone raised in the Midwest, I know a lot of British history. However, I didn't realize that pre-industrialization three-fourths of the children died before they were five -- I thought it was more like two-thirds.

Interestingly, Mosley could drift through the British ruling class with a rather consistent set of beliefs and still be a Conservative, a Liberal, a Socialist, a Keynesian, and a Fascist, without much of a change in his basic outlook.

Proto Fascist or Moto Democrat?

"What does Giorgia Meloni's Win Mean for Italy?" asks Peter Zeihan, conjuring up the ghost (or is it the Spirit?) of Italian Fascism, on account of her "God, country, family" mantra.

Benito Mussolini, the Godfather of fascism, was a socialist. Back in 1964, I was in tenth grade reading a novel by Upton Sinclair (himself a Socialist) and he introduced a loud-mouthed Socialist agitator named Mussolini. Imagine my surprise. Turns out Mussolini modeled his fascist party on Lenin's Bolshevik Party, which ruthlessly ran the United Soviet Socialist Republics of the day (aka Russia). True, Benito was all about "the country" as long as he and his gang were running everything in the country, but as for God and family -- not so much. The fascists had party members in every organization to enforce the party line, so the people who ran businesses were run by the party.

According to Upton Sinclair, the National Socialist "brownshirt" street brawlers who slugged it out with the communist/socialist Antifa during the Weimar Republic were also Socialists -- so it was kind of an intramural sport. Later Stalin's USSR and Hitler's Third Reich found common ground -- Poland. Given the history, I never agreed with the progressive propensity to label small government conservatives as fascists, at least here in the U.S. After all, what American Conservatives want to conserve are things like the Bill of Rights and local governments with local control.

As for Italy's political future: who knows?

Whither Italy?