Category: History

Det är hög tid att påminna om Carl Johan Ljungbergs blogg igen, det var alltför länge sedan jag gjorde det. I sitt senaste inlägg skriver han om det för 1900-talets fortsatta historia så avgörande fredsfördraget i Versailles:

“I år kommer hackiga journalfilmer med militära framryckningar över leriga, sönderspränga fält att sändas i repris. Vi kommer att åter höra förtvivlans ord från skalder och författare – Remarque, Owen och Sassoon bland andra. Tragiken i att så många unga européer 1914-18 stupade i skyttegravarna undanskymmer dock en ännu större olycka – den att segrarna under inflytande av USA:s president Woodrow Wilson pålade det förlorade Tyskland villkor vars hårdhet och bristande logik födde en revanschvilja som blev ödesdiger för Europa och omvärlden.

Första världskriget har i dag glömts eller överskuggats av senare illdåd. Men genom detta krig kom länderna särskilt i central- och östeuropa att tillfogas förluster i människoliv som övergår dem i alla tidigare bataljer, innefattat Napoleonkrigens. Utöver alla stupade och döda uppstod oerhörda materiella skador. En tung konsekvens var att den gamla makt- och samhällsordningen förstördes, på gott och ont. Ett kejsardöme – det tyska – som dock symboliserat stabilitet, välstånd och framsteg hade fallit, tyskarnas värderingar, lojaliteter och trosföreställningar hade ifrågasatts i en grad att man kan tala om ett etiskt tomrum. Därtill föll motsvarande samhällsordningar i Österrike, Ryssland och det ottomanska imperiet.

Läget i Europa var på många håll livshotande. Enbart i Tyskland hade två miljoner man stupat, de flesta unga och många familjeförsörjare. Det uppstod ett samhälle där många led akut nöd: krigsinvalider, änkor och faderlösa. De många demobiliserade soldaterna levde på fattigdomens gräns, hungern var svår och livsmedelsköer skapade vrede och frustration. Inte minst hade krigslånen utarmat många. Sjukdomar som tuberkulos och spanska sjukan härjade. Många hemvändande frontsoldater fick som symbol för nederlaget även möta statens och hemmabefolkningens oförståelse och otacksamhet.

Efter kriget bröt i flera av de förlorande länderna gränstvister och inbördeskrig ut. Svårt led stater som inte hade infört parlamentarism eller inte hunnit så långt i sin modernisering. Flera av dessa stater hade en svag statsmakt. Hur segrarna valde att bemöta de förlorande nationerna fick troligen de värsta följderna, inte bara för Europa utan för världen.”

Läs hela, och även alla andra utmärkta inlägg som jag inte separat uppmärksammat här.

Norma, 1985

Baksida:

President Franklin D. Roosevelt och hans insatser under andra världskriget får i denna bok en ingående kritisk granskning. I bokens inledning skriver författaren bl.a.:

En objektiv bild av mänsklighetens brödrastrider kan vi förvisso aldrig nå fram till, men vi kan medverka till att förhindra alla försök att förvanska bilden. Vi kan sträva efter att låta vän och fiende, segrare och besegrad, komma till tals. En eftervärld har då beretts möjligheter att bilda sig en sannfärdig uppfattning om sina förfäders gärningar. Därmed har historieskrivningen i all sin bristfällighet lämnat bidrag till det som vi människor till slut bör eftersträva: sanningen.

“Sir William Jones (28 September 1746 – 27 April 1794) was an Anglo-Welsh philologist and scholar of ancient India, particularly known for his proposition of the existence of a relationship among Indo-European languages. He, along with Henry Thomas Colebrooke and Nathaniel Halhed, founded the Asiatic Society of Bengal, and started a journal called ‘Asiatick Researches’.”  Read more: Wikipedia

In Hegel’s version of the significative attempt to preserve structured order in this new situation, the personal God was seemingly only nominally preserved in some late defensive writings for quite extra-systematic purposes, and the unifying idea on which alone the structuring depended was never conceived as transcendent in the first place. As merely one of the many expressions of a Hermetically conceived immanence, Hegel’s new articulate cataphaticism was doomed already for such intrinsic reasons to fail in a much more obvious way in this regard. From the beginning, the Right Hegelians, or at least the so-called “speculative theists”, saw the need for, and called for, a metaphysical supplementation.

But quite apart from these reasons, Hegelianism was also fated to a considerable extent to become submerged in the forces unleashed by the industrial and political revolutions. Since their classicism had been mixed up with modern rationalism ever since Descartes, the refined defenders of the hitherto dominant, French-inspired culture were often unable, even as they were forced in the face of the historical development of the nineteenth century – in which France itself took a leading part – to turn towards a stricter and more traditionalist classicism, to see the partial truths of the new German criticism of Enlightenment thought. But they did see its untruths.

In the new darkness brought on by the pantheistic revolution, all cows must, in the eyes of the French critics, perforce turn black. There could no longer be any well-grounded distinctions, any proper discernment. Everything flowed, everything was becoming, everything was relative. Since the unity and totality knew itself only through the infinite forms of the chaotic dispersion, the whole noisy confusion of the energies let loose by the Revolution must be accepted, indeed enthusiastically welcomed, embraced by Cosmic Love. Predictably, the demons were already at large, in art and literature as well as on the battlefield. Moral discrimination became impossible. Since transcendence was denied, there was not even in principle the possibility of an accessible vantage-point, or even one accepted as a mere necessary regulative idea, from which to make judgements.

Thought became so vague that contradictions could no longer be identified as such; the limited and the well-defined were dismissed as superficiality. There could be no well-grounded choices between different alternatives, all ideas had the same worth, truth was infinite and all-comprehensive, the mandatory tolerance could be based only on relativism. Criticism was lost, as was selection, refinement, and style. The differentiational perspective from which true and false, good and evil, beauty and ugliness could once be distinguished, at least to some extent, at least for the purpose of general orientation, had been absorbed in the process of the closed immanent totality.

In this pseudo-divine carnival, where the crassest material forces – both of the captains of industry and of the Enlightenment machinery of the state – advanced more ruthlessly than ever behind the shifting veils of neoclassicism, neohumanism, idealism, and romantic reverie and picturesqueness, it was the unstable Ego of individualism, rather than the person, that flourished, and that alone could flourish. For all his self-assertive, neoteric expressionism, the romantic individual moves from narcissism, via cosmic, subjective ego-inflation, to objective self-annihilation in the larger pantheistic whole in any of its manifestations.

Such self-actualization, drawing out the utmost nihilistic consequences of the self-creation of the Renaissance individualists, was sheer illusion, since there simply was no self to actualize. In a world closed upon itself and without ontic logos, the only values there could be were those posited by the individual, and such positing was what was expected of the new historical Heroes. Yet they pathetically failed to perform the expected Deeds, dragged down by the unacknowledged, constitutive imperfection of their human nature, devoid of grace.

The moral ambiguity of the new individual-cosmic self-actualization was glaring; with ethical dualism rejected along with metaphysical dualism, the new autonomy did not stop short of the Satanic. The only enemy, the only remaining evil was that which represented or was perceived as representing the resistance to the new pantheism itself, to the Righteous Goodness of the Human-Divine Ego and Nature: the conventional order of the establishment, the Church, the remnants of the ancien régime. The enemy’s scruples were only expressions of its false morality, and having been so repressed and deformed by this enemy, the Beautiful Soul had the right to go beyond its narrow conventions, to challenge them, if necessary by violent means. Only though releasing the demonic, the criminal, the perverted, the diseased, was it possible, under the present circumstances, to find the true self.

Or rather, to become one with the newly conceived whole. The underlying drive was the age-old one of the problematic forms of esotericism and monistic mysticism: to simply become God. But not only did failure produce disillusion; God was also redefined even beyond the undifferentiated oneness. The Beautiful Souls and Geniuses were lost in erotic intoxication with feelings, in the identification with the resurgent dark, irrational side of reality which the human fiat of modern rationalism had never managed to suppress; they were consumed by the Dionysian urge for ecstatic self-annihilation, for final extinction. At the peak of the absolute freedom, of “authentic” self-expression, of self-exaltation, they turned towards dissolution and destruction of an individual self which was in reality weak and sickly. What it really desired was ultimate ecstatic identification with nature/God, the erotic Mother-Goddess, the All-Ego, the irrational, arbitrary, nihilistic Will of the world-process, the empty oneness, the Void, Nothingness, Death. And a similar impulse was often found to underlie the new kind of search for identification with the Nation, the People, the State.

This, needless to say, is not the whole truth about this historical period. But the neglected fact is that its other truths, and not least its genuinely personalist ones, can be neither properly understood nor preserved or reappropriated unless these general truths about romantic pantheism are understood. The individualism it produced was often the shallowest thing. [For a few of the very many aspects and expressions of this, see Gerald N. Izenberg, Impossible Individuality: Romanticism, Revolution, and the Origin of Modern Selfhood, 1787-1802 (1992), which, however, is far from the fuller and deeper historical understanding of the pantheistic revolution.]

I, 1932-36

Den grundligare urskillning av folkhemmets goda och dåliga sidor som aktualiseras av dagens nationalisters åberopande av det kräver naturligtvis att vi tittar närmare på flera av dessa herrar (några nya tyngre socialdemokratiska namn tillkom väl inte i Hanssons senare regeringar utan först i Erlanders): fr. v. Arthur Engberg, Karl Schlyter, Östen Undén, Henning Leo, Hansson, Fritjof Ekman, Richard Sandler, Ernst Wigforss, Torsten Nothin, Ivar Vennerström, Per Edvin Sköld, Gustav Möller. Men vare sig ifråga om de goda eller dåliga sidorna räcker en sådan granskning; ett bredare och djupare historiskt perspektiv är nödvändigt.

stiger av 12an vid Alvik

Modernity as Rationalized Sexual Misbehavior

Ignatius Press, 1993     Amazon.com

Back Cover:

In this groundbreaking new book, Jones shows how some of the major determining leaders in modern thought and culture have rationalized their own immoral behavior and projected it onto a universal canvas. The main thesis of the book is that, in the intellectual life, there are only two ultimate alternatives: either the thinker conforms desire to truth or he conforms truth to desire.

In the last one hundred years, the western cultural elite embarked upon a project which entailed the reversal of the values of the intellectual life so that truth would be subjected to desire as the final criterion of intellectual value. In looking at recent biographies of such major moderns as Freud, Kinsey, Keynes, Margaret Mead, Picasso, and others, there is a remarkable similarity between their lives and thought. After becoming involved in sexual license early on, they invariably chose an ideology or art form which subordinated reality to the exigencies of their sexual misbehavior.

“Degenerate Moderns is a marvelous tour de force. Jones provides the reader not only with an overview of the sources of modern culture but also with a way of understanding what otherwise might seem simply surprising…at the root of many of the most influential books and theories lies the sexual problems of their authors. Sophisticated, informative and learned as this book is, it can be read as a high level corroboration of what your mother always told you. Jones is one of the most readable writers I know.”  Ralph McInerny, University of Notre Dame

“In the Ethics, Aristotle pointed out that ‘Men start revolutionary changes for reasons connected with their private lives.’ This is also Michael Jones’ thesis in his profound new book. It is extraordinary how much of the modern landscape is illuminated by this perspective, as Jones dissects the moral lives of the progenitors of modernity and shows the intellectual consequences. His treatment of Mead, Kinsey, Freud and Jung is devastating. This is not an ad hominem attack, but a brilliant illustration of the inescapable relationship between the order of the soul and the order of everything external to it.”  Robert Reilly, ‘Voice of America’

“A fascinating blend of biography, intellectual history, and investigative reporting. This book takes up where Paul Johnson’s Intellectuals leaves off. It should be required reading for anyone who wishes to understand the intellectual fashions of the Twentieth century.”  William K. Kilpatrick, Author, Psychological Seduction

About the Author:

E. Michael Jones is a writer, former professor, media commentator and the current editor of Culture Wars magazine (formerly Fidelity magazine).

1998

See also Richard M. Gamble: The War for Righteousness