Lifting the Great Silence
The research never ends
By
Three months is by far the longest period where I have not contributed new writing or updates for readers of The Turn. Today’s post is to explain why, and will share some of the sources of my latest preoccupations. New subscribers have come on board during this period of deafening silence. Although, I think all readers know that I haven’t really been silent at all. As the contributing editor/publisher/curator of Woke Watch Canada, I regularly publish an average of five articles per week. It’s an enormous task, one that too often leaves The Turn lonely and neglected.
However, The Turn is always in the back of my mind. There is so much additional commentary that can be added here - unfortunately there have been far too many instances where the storm of ideas in my head, for various reasons, remained unwritten, and wasted. This will most likely not be the last time this will happen and that my absence will be prolonged. However, I will try my best to provide at least a monthly summary of what is going on.
Thank you to all the subscribers for hanging in there. It amazes me that in spite of the lack of content lately, some people took out new paid subscriptions, and others upgraded to paid memberships. I appreciate the support more than anything!! Please don’t take my absence as somehow slacking in my Culture War mission. Your contributions are vital. A ton is being accomplished (too much for me to get into today) as the quality (and quantity) of Woke Watch Canada work increases!
What was so important that I haven’t written in three months?
The simplest answer is: research.
I have been reading books, essays, speeches, letters, and even a telegram. I am searching. I’m trying to connect dots. I’m not doing it alone. I’m in constant conversation with other academics and researchers who are pursuing different aspects of what I see as a larger problem bound together through a multitude of seemingly unrelated problems. The over-arching issue is most famously known as Wokeism.
It is clear from the research being done by myself and others, and by a number of books published on the subject of Wokeism, that Marxism is its guiding philosophy. To be clear, when I use the term Marxism, I am referring to the writings of both Karl Marx and Marx’s followers. I refer to the specific brand of Marxism contained within the period of Marx’s life as “Classical Marxism” or “Economic Marxism.” However, the term “Marxism” by itself, refers to all strains of Marxist ideology. A simplified formula looks like this: Classical Marxism + Neo-Marxism = Marxism. Note that “Neo-Marxism” is sometimes called “Cultural Marxism” or “Western Marxism.”
For months I have been re-examining different aspects of Marxism. A good place to pick up the story is June 12, 2023 when I published an essay called The Origins of Socialism. This essay is about a book of the same name that Mr. M and I had included previously in the research bibliography of our Great Illiberal Subversion project.
For the past few months I have been going on the Richard Syrett Show on Suaga 960 AM, for an 8 minute segment we call the Anti-Woke Book Club every Monday, and in most cases I bring selections from this bibliography. So I decided I would start writing a series of essays on these books for the Anti-Woke Book Club. The book, The Origins of Socialism is Volume One!
I still have more work to do on this book. My essay only covers the first part: the utopianism of the French intellectuals during the revolutionary period, who inspired later socialist theorists, including Marx and Engels. The last part of the book deals with a phase in the evolution of early socialism the author calls the Marxian synthesis, the fusing together of French, British, and German social theory. This section of The Origins of Socialism along with a book by Thomas Sowell called Marxism: Philosophy and economics, will be the source of an Anti-Woke Book Club essay coming soon.
For Volume Two of the Anti-Woke Book club I wrote an essay examining a speech given by James Lindsay regarding his theory that Wokeism is Marxism adapted for the West. You can read Volume Three here - it begins my re-examination of cold war era International Communist politics. For this essay I will be offering some commentary on George Kennan’s famous 1946 “Long Telegram.”
Some other books I’ve been looking at regarding International Communism are: The Comintern by Duncan Hallas. And The Comintern: A History of International Communism from Lenin to Stalin by Kevin McDermott and Jeremy Agnew.
In the James Lindsay speech mentioned above a bunch of seemingly unrelated ideologies are revealed to be “species” of the Marxist “genus.” The “species” given as examples by Lindsay are: Classical Marxism, Radical Feminism, Critical Race Theory, Queer Theory, and Post Colonial Theory. Lindsay explains that it is “intersectionality” that binds these things together and makes them treated, with Marxist logic, as though they are one thing.
The Marxist ideologies listed by Lindsay are the same ones I have been researching. I agree that there is a Marxist guiding logic and all of it is tied together with intersectionality. The similarities are many between the Woke, who Lindsay explains, are pursuing equity as the end goal of a cultural revolution, and Marxist revolutionaries throughout the Cold War era and after who pursued socialism. Could “equity” be just a continuation of the same International Communist revolution that has roots pre-dating the cold war? The only way to find out is to study and re-examine the origins and development of Marxism/Socialism/Communism, in light of everything we know today about the Woke cultural revolution with its uncomfortably alarming similarities to the Marxist-Leninism of the Chinese cultural revolution.
Even just a glance through some of the material available on Communism reveals that the movement has always been international (and anti-national), it was anti-war (when it came to wars between nations) but pro-war (when it came to internal civil wars), it was anti-imperial and anti-colonial (from this, Post Colonial Theory). There are many other similarities, but let's stop there for now.
Marxist and Neo-Marxist Theories provide all of the ingredients necessary for citizens to resent their nations and their nation's histories, to forget about the liberties and rights that the status of citizenship gives, and to long for some amorphous international order (global citizenship) that does not offer the same promises afforded to the citizens of liberal democratic nations.
The last 600 years of consequential history are key to understanding the present predicament. The transition from Monarchies to democracies is the general source of much of the troubles surrounding modern politics. From the inspired Renaissance period, the enlightenment, the Glorious Revolution, to the French Revolutions and subsequent upheavals they inspired, and through two Great Wars, the McCarthy Era, all the way up to the Reagan Era, these consequential events and periods deserve re-examination, especially when one considers what we know about the subversive cultural revolution currently unfolding in the West.
Needless to say there is a lot of written scholarship and investigative research published on these topics. Our research bibliography contains material written from both pro-socialist or pro-Woke and anti-socialist or anti-woke perspectives. There is also, as mentioned in my Long Telegram essay, John Earl Haynes’s online research bibliography with over 9000 entries concerning American Communism - American Communism and Anticommunism: (johnearlhaynes.org)
Two important works I’m looking at, written by authors in the pro-socialist camp, are foundational to Cultural Marxism. They are selections from Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks, and George Lukacs’s History and Class Consciousness. The Frankfurt School developed the ideas in these books into Critical Theory (which is also known as Critical Marxism).
What does communism have to do with colonialism?
In one of the past segments of the Anti-Woke Book Club, Richard and I discussed the essay, The Case for Colonialism by Bruce Gilley. Looking into the origins of International Communism I found the same anti-colonial sentiment that we see in modern day Post Colonial Theory. This is why academics like Brue Gilley are so important. Colonialism must be re-examined, and defended. Post Colonial Theory is a Marxist framework deployed to place “colonizers” in conflict with “natives.” Historical processes are always far too complex to fit into a reductive schema like Marxism.
An important book on this topic is Nigel Biggar’s Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning - a work that re-examines colonialism from an ethics perspective. And there are two full length books by Bruce Gilley that offer even more insightful analysis and re-examination of colonialism. They are In Defense of German Colonialism and The Last Imperialist: Sir Alan Burns' Epic Defense of the British Empire.
In the Canadian context, anti–colonial Neo-Marxists gloss over the cooperative nature that persisted throughout the early years of European contact with the Indigenous in Canada. The essay Agents of Their Own Desires: Indian Consumers and the Hudson’s Bay Company 1700-1770, by Carlos and Lewis (PDF Attached below), tells a far different story than the one we hear modern “post colonial” historians tell about early European settlers relationship with the Canadian indigenous.
Anti-colonial sentiment is particularly strong in Canada where indigenous issues, especially those related to Truth and Reconciliation, are used by woke activists in an excessively coercive way to guilt and shame the Canadian public, and enrage indigenous people who are told that past Canadian governments conspired in a genocide against them. By contrast, in American politics, it is the history of slavery which is used in this manner to coercively forward Social Justice goals, but in both cases the goal is to undermine Western traditions and values by problematizing its history.
In Canada, the history of the treatment of indigenous is weaponized, while in the states it is the history of the treatment of African Americans. This piece of course fits nicely with the global or international nature that Communism has always had. The general rationale is that Western nations are bad - just look at their awful histories of oppression - so they must be dissolved into an international something or other. Or, it's really about stripping away the individual rights afforded citizens of liberal societies, and replacing them with a designation of post-national “global citizenship” with no individual rights, only responsibilities, ie. Slavery.
On that dark note, I will leave it for today. I promise to return soon, I must, I barely scratched the surface. Thanks again for hanging in their friends!!!
I think it is a sign of a deep thinker to not publish frequently or voluminously. It takes a long time to formulate thoughts, read multiple sources, talk to people, run your ideas by them, rethink things, then write your thoughts down coherently. In our Twitter-ized world much of what is on the internet is the antithesis of this. People are writing their brief and pithy response to something they are reading or hearing even before they have finished taking it in. They react rather than think. I really like low-volume, high quality writing. So don't apologize for your absence. I take it as a sign of you being a thoughtful person.
I agree with James on this central point: “The general rationale is that Western nations are bad - just look at their awful histories of oppression - so they must be dissolved into an international something or other. Or, it's really about stripping away the individual rights afforded citizens of liberal societies, and replacing them with a designation of post-national “global citizenship” with no individual rights, only responsibilities, ie. Slavery.” That is wokeism - excessive self debasement leading to a dystopia.