As always I state and restate my own
purposes here. It is the only way to avoid the mire: the traps laid by men whose interest it is to shut down and stifle conversation.
Instead of letting that bog me down the strategy I develop is one of asking, and trying to answer, why does this come about? The effect (taking Flash's responses for an example) is that the ridicule or the insult, and because it is only a rhetorical device, it drives any conversation into a tit-for-tat in which the actual topics and subjects are lost sight of. What interests me, and amazes me, is the will involved in refusal to consider the views and perspectives of others.
But, and this is the obvious thing and the most important, that mired dynamic is what defines cultural communication in our present. So people come into a space (say a forum for discussing politics, take
Debate Politics for example) to discuss issues of the day, but it often happens that their real reason for coming to the space is really to find Their Enemy so that they can engage in unending bickering exchanges that get nowhere.
With that said my *complaint* about Flash is not that he opposes ideas that can be said with some accuracy to have something in common with fascistic ideas, or more extreme Right-oriented ideas, or ideas that are part-and-parcel of rigidly defined cultural/religious ideology, and even (or especially) ideas that are critical of democracy and Liberalism, and social orientations that originate in cultural chauvinism, race realism and even overt racialism, but rather that his real object is to put up blocks so that it becomes impossible to calmly and carefully examine the propositions and to understand why people seem, perhaps more now, to resort to these ideas.
One need not accept the ideas one examines, nor be a champion or apologist for them, when one examines differing POV. It is only in this sense that I use the term *philosophy* and *philosophical conversation* here in this context of discussion. These are not exchanges between philosophers debating some academic philosophical point, it is rather people with specific cultural affiliations discussing current events.
My *strategy*, such as it is, is just to notice it, talk about it, and label it for what (I believe) it is. And that is essentially to block the discussion of certain ideas declared to be *beyond the pale*. I am interested in the mechanism of self-censorship and, as Jonathan Bowden talks about, 'a European grammar of self-intolerance'. A certain idea arises in the mind and it is undercut immediately. Certain ideas are pre-tainted with a sense of queasiness and *wrongness* such that whole areas of thought are off-limits.
So then, and as it seems and indeed as it is, there are people writing and discoursing in our present who take a critical, idea-based, coherent and intellectually responsible position in respect to the ideological construct of our day -- those *truths* that we have absorbed, in short our cultural, social, political and ideological
programming -- and who revisit the topics with a revisionist's outlook.
In my own case, as when I began a process of challenging my own progressive assumptions and ideological orientation, it happened that I examined the American Civil War from a contrary position (reading among others Richard Weaver's
The Southern Tradition at Bay). To put it in reduced terms the common view of the Civil War, is an intensely propagandized set of political notions and determined historical interpretations that are part-and-parcel of "America's civil religion'. They have only a slight relationship to *truth* and have far more to do with political and social manipulation. The actual truth, when one confronts it, paints a very very different picture that has to do with power-dynamics. It is not in any sense a difficult concept, indeed everyone knows it and recognizes it: we live within these semi-true and also semi-false constructs that can be described, or interpreted as 'civil-religions'.
When these civil religious constructs are challenged, and I would strongly suggest that in America today, as in other places, that deconstruction is a primary activity within the Culture Wars and in relation to the
interpretation of America, established political and social views (civil religious notions) are being turned on their head. But here is the interesting thing: it is a confused, chaotic, raw and turbulent process not unlike a guessing game. People who had received cultural and national narratives who then find reasons to challenge those received narratives,
grope to arrive at others that appear to them to be *truer*.
I could easily refer to the video on Rumble that Wizard submitted: Elijah Shaefer, Nick Fuentes, and Vincent James (I am familiar to some degree with all of them -- I know little of Gavin McInnes) arrange a strange but interesting conversation/debate with a Jewish fellow, and the topic is a strange mishmash of not altogether very clear ideas and assertions seeming to be of a religious nature basically (?) It is very hard to discern what really is going on there.
But the point I'd make is that these exchanges are carried on by people who strive to arrive at new definitions and interpretations of their world as a result of no longer having faith in conventional narratives. The curious thing, from where I sit, is that they are
there having a convivial good-humored conversation. Even Adam Green, who has been classified by the SPLC as a dedicated and acute antisemite, often sets up debate-conversations with serious Rabbis (those who are willing to come on his show and there are a few who are willing).
So what is happening here? And by here I mean *culturally* and out there in the cyber-spheres? Or down in the subterranean regions of opinion and thought? It is all very strange and puzzling.
So let's consider just for a second what I perceive to be somewhat more pointed and (perhaps) better articulated views of genuine ideological opposition to the tenets and ideological constructs of our present. Take for example Johathan Bowden discoursing on a very odd cultural figure of the Postwar,
Savitri Devi.
What interests me in the view presented by Bowden is not so much its content, though it is interesting, but rather that it demonstrates how at an idealogical and interpretive level the defined *ball of yarn* of our received histories begins to become undone. There are people who take up ideas and conceptual constructs that they define as operating against the determined flow of time. It is the ultimate rebel's position.
Flash, little brother, I know reading this far cost you a great deal emotionally and perhaps spiritually. As a consolation prize, as an award for genuine and righteous anti-Nazi perseverance, I offer you
this.