Rousseau's Hydra

Mark Brittingham is a name to watch. You need to drop everything and go read "The Cold War is Not Over: Europe and the Post-Modern Left". It's up in the same league as David Ramsay Steele's "The Mystery of Fascism". I'm adding it to the Classics links. Anyone capable of striking a crescendo hammer blow in a survey of modern political philosophy with a devastating Czeslaw Milosz quote stands head and shoulders above the crowd:

"Chomsky, like nearly all of Rousseau's intellectual descendents and Rousseau himself, is enamored of propaganda. Should their ideological assumptions fail to rationally describe the real world it is easily enough dismissed as a limitation of rationality itself (pace Feyerabend). A nihilistic focus on the Will to Power - on power itself - marks all living descendents of Rousseau's experiment even as some among them, like Rorty, struggle with the legacy of violence found in their tradition. Among the initiated; the assorted leftists, anarchists, "queer theorists" and feminists, the pressure for ideological conformity is enormous. Indeed, the pressure to remain on the "right side" of the anti-Capitalist debate is so strong that groups such as "Queers for Palestine" openly support Islamic thugs under whose rule their own members would surely be brutally harassed or even murdered.

There is little surprise here. In all previous incarnations of anti-Capitalist power, ideological conformity was the centerpiece of political control. In the former Soviet Union and its satellites, the crushing of dissent was so total as to inspire Czeslaw Milosz to write:

"OFFICIALLY, contradictions do not exist in the minds of the citizens in the people's democracies [the former Soviet empire]. Nobody dares to reveal them publicly. And yet, the question of how to deal with them is posed in real life. More than others, the members of the intellectual elite are aware of this problem. They solve it by becoming actors. ...A constant and universal masquerade creates an aura that is hard to bear, yet it grants the performers certain not inconsiderable satisfactions. To say something is white when one thinks it is black, to smile inwardly when one is outwardly solemn, to hate when one manifests love...- these actions lead one to prize one's own cunning above all else...Acting on a comparable scale has not occurred often in the history of the human race." [Milosz, The Captive Mind, pp 54-57]."

Of course, I would lean toward "Gramscian neo-Syndicalists" over "PoMo Left", but when you go digest the scope of what Brittingham has achieved with this moderate length piece it's really no more than nit-picking...