So, who really won the Cold War?

Particularly here in Great Britain:

How many citizens who were robbed knew that the police didn't even bother to look for the criminals, didn't even set a case in motion, so as not to spoil their record of completed cases - why should they sweat to catch a thief if he would be given only six months, and then be given three months off for good behaviour?  And anyway, it wasn't certain the bandits would even be tried when caught.

Finally, sentences were bound to be reduced, and of course for habitual criminals especially.  Watch out there now, witness in the courtroom!  They will all be back soon, and it'll be a knife in the back for anyone who gave testimony!

Therefore, if you see someone crawling through a window [...] shut your eyes! Walk by!  You didn't see anything!

Three guesses as to who wrote that. 

Peter Hitchens?  No.

Melanie Phillips?  No.

Theodore Dalrymple?  No.

It was Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn describing the state of Soviet criminal law under Stalin in The Gulag Archipelago: 1918-1956.

It is what happens in a society when they accept the Marxist idea that crime (of the non-political type) is borne out of economic hardship rather than having a cost-benefit and moral implication.  When I read that part of his book, I became more and more convinced, not that I needed it, that the West may have won the military conflict, but the Communists won the ideological conflict.  Particularly here in the UK.

As time goes by, and more and more records are declassified, it is becoming more and more apparent that Joe McCarthy was mistaken about the amount of Soviet infiltration of American institutions: He underestimated it.  There was something like over 400 Soviet agents and fellow travellers in the State Department, alone, where he had estimated 200.

Now, imagine the amount of Soviet infiltration into institutions in a country that was not actively looking for Soviet infiltrators.  And what you get is modern-day Britain.

My wife is doing some research for her Fine Arts degree on Abstract Expressionism.  Her research is leading her down toward the direction in which madness lays...She has discovered the physical, academic, and institutional links between modern art, the Institute for Social Research (aka the Frankfurt School), Antonio Gramsci, the Ford Foundation, and loads of other links in the Communist/Socialist movements of the 20th Century.  She had no idea the full extent of the forces working to undo Western Civilisation, with that end being part of their stated goals. 

And it is becoming more and more apparent, the more one looks at what these people and their fellow travellers actually stated what they would do, and what has come about in the West over the last 50 years, that there just might be a link between the collapse of the Church, the state of higher education, the intellectual dishonesty of the mass media, and the intentions of the Communists.

Unfortunately (?), there is no central COMINTERN to control the direction of the growing disorder in the West.  And now that the Pandora's Box has been opened, one wonders whether these forces that were unleashed beginning from the 1920s (or even before), will ever be stopped.

I do believe we live in "interesting times" as the Chinese curse goes.

There is more Solzhenitsyn to come...My copy of The Gulag Archipelago now has several dog-eared pages to indicate more gems like the one above.

Comments

[Robert Reis]

Thanks for your information.

I have articles up at majorityrights.com

Cheers,

RER

[NikFromNYC]

"My wife is doing some research for her Fine Arts degree on Abstract Expressionism. Her research is leading her down toward the direction in which madness lays...She has discovered the physical, academic, and institutional links between modern art, the Institute for Social Research (aka the Frankfurt School), Antonio Gramsci, the Ford Foundation, and loads of other links in the Communist/Socialist movements of the 20th Century. She had no idea the full extent of the forces working to undo Western Civilisation, with that end being part of their stated goals."

Alas, twas the century of MANIFESTO-based art output, and theory-based art. They really thought they could change the world with weird paintings.

Tom Wolfe has a thin book called 'The Painted Word' the skewers Modernism in Twain-like fashion. One art CRITIC, Clement Greenberg was essentially the only "artist" of the last century, with the guys who literally scribbled away, signing their name to canvases really just being his assistants, for his written word was godlike in its influence.

Their tactic to undermine classic talent-based art was based on the theory that Van Gogh's work, along with other Impressionists, was spurned by everybody except art critics, which is a BLATANT LIE. In Van Gogh's case (pronounced to rhyme with "cough" in NYC art word circles or you get snubbed by Art World people!), he died in a rural town literally surrounded by peasants. Since Vincent's brother Theo died soon after Vincent, in Paris, a rural bartender ended up owning all of Van Gogh's work. His wife burned all the nude sketch studies as kindling since they were "indecent" and the bartender gave most of the paintings away as bar prizes, which many of the poor peasants had no appreciation of and some literally nailed over leaky holes in their attics! Several months later, Paris art collectors started showing up, since Theo (an art dealer in classic academic art) had helped get a few of Vincent's works into group Impressionism shows, the massive value of his work was a shock to the locals, so the bartender tried buying them back, but overall, most of his paintings (with patched up nail holes) were recovered.

Next, although it was destroyed, Duchamp sent a urinal to an art competition, and it was thrown in the trash. Art critics jumped on this as the latest thing, since he had pictures of it, and since Impressionism had mostly run its course, and not enough truly original and talented impressionist painters could be found to supply the art to the nouveau rich of the Industrial Revolution, so art galleries and critics started PURPOSEFULLY promoting work that the public would find utterly unappealing (unlike Impressionism was very much appealing to ladder-climbing urban people). Thus they added an 'Emperor's New Clothes' effect, in which skeptics were scoffed at for not being able to "appreciate" Fine Art, and they to this day adopted an attitude of High Seriousness, despite Pop Art's short-lived rebellion.

Finally, they had a bunch of reproductions of Duchamp's urinal made up, and a bunch of scribbles on canvas, or even a blank canvas, and hung them up right next to Van Gogh and Rembrandt, with the same serious "wall cards" explaining to the public (or gallery buyers) what the "meaning" of each work was.

Thus, it was a case of demand outstripping supply. This created the necessarily of trashing the whole idea of traditional or actually (instead of "abstractly") expressive art, meaning art of the Western tradition. Another trick was to turn to non-art religious icons of ancient cultures and call those crude sculptural objects "art" to add value to modern crude sculptural objects.

One indication of how small and inbred the Art World is is to look at the advertisements for new gallery openings in any glossy art magazine. There are about 700 galleries in NYC, about two dozen of them being Big Money profitable. But note that they never show pictures of the artwork, just the NAMES of the artists. Why? Since it's an insider's world. All the academics and critics already know who each artist is, especially since they were the ones to arbitrarily pick favorites among the hoards of talentless "artists" that Art Schools produce each year. Besides, it's now the artist's signature that anoints an object as worth $100K, not the object itself, the very same as a hundred years ago when Duchamp merely signed a urinal.

I have a funny story about this. I was buying a computer-controlled cutting machine about a decade ago, and on the way home from one company's demo of how accurate they could cut diamond-shaped holes in a piece of plexiglass, I had this sample with me as I swung by the Armory art show, the "biggie" of the art world, and was sternly told that NO ART could be brought by attendees into the convention floor. I had no luck in explaining that my foot wide piece of plexiglass with random holes cut in it WASN'T ART, but was an industrial sample, so I had to check it along with my coat! They were really quite angry about it, actually, and nearly denied me access at all.

"When I was young, like all the young, art, great art, was my religion; but with the years, I came to see that art, as it was understood until 1800; was henceforth finished, on its last legs, doomed, and that so-called artistic activity with all its abundance is only the manyformed manifestation of its agony. Men are detached from and more and more disinterested in painting, sculpture and poetry; appearances to the contrary, men today have put their hearts into everything else; the machine, scientific discoveries, wealth, the domination of natural forces and immense territories. We no longer feel art as a vital need, as a spiritual necessity, as was the case in centuries past. / Many of us continue to be artists and to be occupied with art for reasons which have little in common with true art, but rather through a spirit of imitation, through nostalgia for tradition, through mere inertia, through love of ostentation, of prodigality, of intellectual curiosity, through fashion or through calculation. They live still through force of habit and snobbery in a recent past, but the great majority in all places no longer have any sincere passion for art, which they consider at most as a diversion, a hobby and a decoration. Little by little, new generations with a predilection for mechanics and sports, more sincere, more cynical and brutal, will leave art to the museums and libraries as an incomprehensible and useless relic of the past. / From the moment that art is no longer the sustenance that nourishes the best, the artist may exteriorize his talent in all sorts of experiments with new formulas, in endless caprices and fancy, in all the expedients of intellectual charlatanism. In the arts, people no longer seek consolation, nor exaltation. But the refined, the rich, the indolent, distillers of quintessence seek the new, the unusual, the original, the extravagant, the shocking. And I, since cubism and beyond, I have satisfied these gentlemen and these critics with all the various whims which have entered my head, and the less they understood them, the more they admired. By amusing myself at these games, at all these tomfoolery's, at all these brain-busters, riddles and arabesques, I became famous quite rapidly. And celebrity means for a painter: sales increment, money, wealth. / Today, as you know, I am famous and very rich. But when completely alone with myself, I haven't the nerve to consider myself an artist in the great and ancient sense of the word. There have been great painters like Giotto, Titian, Rembrandt and Goya. I am only a public entertainer who has understood his time. This is a bitter confession, mine, more painful indeed than it may seem, but it has the merit of being sincere." - Pablo Picasso (In ORIGIN 12 1964)

[James G]

Hi Nik,
I very much appreciate the commentary.

I do think though, that despite the modern art world being small and inbred, it is still influential in that much of what emanates from it finds its way into elite thinking, pop culture, and the education establishment at some point.

Despite discovering, through my wife's research, that Mark Rothko was one of the biggest true-believer manifesto type artists ever, I still like his work, and luckily I can compartmentalise it, in the same way I can appreciate Tim Robbins' acting ability. But how many people buy it all, hook, line, and sinker?

I have a musician friend whom I am convinced embraces all the pet subjects of the Left because that's what he's supposed to do as a musician and if every one knew that he had squarish ideas on raising families and the like (something his old-school English working class background won't let him forget), I suspect he wouldn't be perceived as being as "cool" as he is. And art and culture revolve just as much, if not more, around image as substance.

How much of it is by design and how much just happened?

[artfldgr]

How much of it is by design and how much just happened?

A whole lot is by design, and the flow is not from the artists to the elite, but from the connected who fund them.

Unpopular Front
http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2005/10/17/051017crat_atlarge

There was no secret about the policy, and most of its enactments—such as the Fulbright Program, which was established in 1946—were carried out in broad daylight and to public acclaim. But some were carefully shrouded, made to appear the work of individuals and institutions acting on their own, without government sponsorship, as was the case with the magazine Encounter, which was published in London and contributed to by prominent American and European intellectuals, and which was revealed, in 1967, to be a creature of the C.I.A.

and one only has to pay close attention to the little things to get more of an idea.

Man in the shadows
28 October 1991 Forbes Magazine
http://www.vkvint.com/documents/man_in_shadows.pdf

Where it has been identified, party property inside the country is being transferred to local authorities. Local governments have already taken control of more than 4,000 party publishing and printing houses 40 of them being among the world’s biggest. Many of them will soon be used to form joint ventures with major foreign publishing conglomerates.

with control of that many media places, all they have to do is select what makes money, and the art, literature, etc... will just follow as there is no money in the uplifting forms.

and to congress...
Communist Goals (1963)
Congressional Record--Appendix, pp. A34-A35 January 10, 1963

22. Continue discrediting American culture by degrading all forms of artistic expression. An American Communist cell was told to "eliminate all good sculpture from parks and buildings, substitute shapeless, awkward and meaningless forms."

23. Control art critics and directors of art museums. "Our plan is to promote ugliness, repulsive, meaningless art."

24. Eliminate all laws governing obscenity by calling them "censorship" and a violation of free speech and free press.

25. Break down cultural standards of morality by promoting pornography and obscenity in books, magazines, motion pictures, radio, and TV.

26. Present homosexuality, degeneracy and promiscuity as "normal, natural, healthy."

27. Infiltrate the churches and replace revealed religion with "social" religion. Discredit the Bible and emphasize the need for intellectual maturity which does not need a "religious crutch."

note that thats what was written before the summer of love... (free love is an invention of the russians in the early part of lenins rule - just look it up)

dont forget to read about the franfurt school, and gramsci's slow walk through the institutions.

most of it is by design...

which is why your friend knows to tow the line... because if he dont have right mind, he dont succeed.

the idea was to take a system of merit, and turn it into a sham, payola, etc based crap... they figured that once you moved it to abstractions, then you can promote it by doing artsy fartsy talk and people would be too ashamed to go against the crowd, and be INDIVIDUALS... (note that their assault on the schools started 30 years before that, and you can read the teachers meeting where they decided to stop educating, and start indoctrinating. after all, if a group is too powerful to steal their money under the pretend goals of socialism, then making them stupid will let others win the race and redistrubute wealth that way. note china is going to take that, and russia has taken the wests money and upgraded all their weapons to par with the west AND nuclear ready)

fun fun fun... no?

[James G.]

artfldgr,
Bloody brilliant!

Thanks loads.