From Tomislav Sunic's
Homo Americanus: Child of the Postmodern Age (2007)
Americanism and its accompanying dogma of liberalism came to be viewed, after the breakdown of communism, as a safe exit which enabled many leftist thinkers and authors to save face yet help them continue with the same sloganeering about egalitarianism and global humanity, albeit in a more respectable and non-violent Americanized fashion. An external ritual had to be changed too. At some recent point in history European and American left leaning intellectuals made pilgrimages to Havana and to Moscow. After the Cold War, with the beginning of postmodernity, it became mandatory, short of ruining one's career, to travel to the newly found super-egos: Tel Aviv andNew York.
However much communism maybe dead as a programmatic religion, its verbal substratum in Americanism is much alive, not just among left-leaning intellectuals but even among those Americans professing conservative beliefs. One must dismiss the communist signifiers, and look instead into the signified. Inthe USA there are surprisingly many academics who seriously believe in the veracity of egalitarian and pan-racial ideas, although they package these ideas in humanitarian or Christian ecumenical words. Red star and hammer and sickle are dated referents in America; what is crucial is the usage of new symbols conveying the same meaning, but in a disarming and more sentimental way. In order to enforce its paleo-communist goals, Americanism requires a different social setting than the one the Bolsheviks used in Russia at the beginning of the 20th century. Therefore, words and sentence structures conveying communistic messages in America must be framed by different signifiers.
Modern public discourse in the USA is also teeming with Soviet-style messages such as “ethnic sensitivity training,” “political correctness,” “affirmative action,” and “holocaust studies.” This is best observed in American higher education which, over the last thirty years, has transformed itself into places of higher commissariats of political correctness which consist of “committees on preventing racial perjuries,” “ethnic diversity training programs,” and in which racial awareness courses have become mandatory for the faculty staff and students. No longer are professors required to demonstrate skills in their subject matters; instead, they must parade with sentimental and self-deprecatory statements which, as a rule, denigrate European cultural heritage. What strikes the eyes is that these new verbal constructs and neologisms resemble retarded and well masked carbon copies of the old Communist meta-language going back to the 50s and 60s, and which was once obligatorily parroted in different dialects by communized subjects all over Eastern Europe and Russia. These refurbished ritual utterances are now being mouthed by Homo americanus.
Consistently I mention that we must make efforts to
see and
understand Our Present. We must understand the 'causal chain' of events that have brought us to where we are. This involves both historical and cultural analysis (the external) and penetrating self-analysis (the internal).
Penetrating self-analysis, here on this forum and thread, is quite lacking. In my lexicon of meanings the term 'victim' is the one I use to describe the postmodern man who has been (is being) intensely
Americanized in the sense that Sunic puts it. To the degree it has you in its grasp, and the degree to which you *embrace* it (are fucked by it and fuck others with it) is the degree to which you are
a victim.
Do I expect, say, Iambiguous or Seeds (recent interlocutors) to grasp the relevance of what I am proposing as
a necessary first step? Seeds swoons in psychedelic visions; Iambiguous dismisses all necessary preliminary thinking and establishing definitions to that of getting hoisted on intellectual skyhook contraptions. Both of these men seem possessed by 'hysterical' modes of expression of their ideas as well as by ideas borne out of hysterical perception. My assertion: all of this crap needs to be
cut through. But here is the weird thing, according to my view: you must spend 90% of your time confronting the sort of 'constructs' that Sunic alludes to in these paragraphs.
My terms that these have been 'installed' and that people 'wed' them to their personalities --
this is what has to be examined.
Especially virulent and even somewhat resourceful is Master Iambiguous who has worked out a set of nomenclature to cast ironic shadows on those who demonstrate that they wish to examine things philosophically. Based on my observation, and those Iambiguous can himself *wiggle* extraordinarily within his non-committal terminologies, Iambiguous is a nice example of a Postmodern Man captured in
Americanism. In that is his metaphysical ground. In that is his furious emotionalized defenses of egalitarian-progressive principles, and in that the 'links' to coercive Marxism and its trickery is to be uncovered and
hauled out into the light for examination.
Strangely, but yet it makes sense, it is next-to-impossible to dialogue with men like Seeds and Iambiguous. The first thing you run into is the 'Construct' of their own selves. It could be a small, tight edifice or a somewhat more towering one, but it is one nonetheless and it is often established through
impenetrability. No discussion about it and no discussion critical of its tenets is even possible according to their view.
It is this impenetrability' that in my view needs to be questioned and examined.
But let the
IMAGES be posted! Let the
GIANT POINT EXCLAMATIONS be seen!
Normal large huge! Whatever it takes! This is postmodern theatre after all!
