Med andra ord, det gick åt helvete

Om ni bortser från hajpen om "framgångar" så är detta en bra sammanfattning av klimatmötet i Madrid. Ja, det gick som väntat käpprätt åt skogen.

Down and out at COP25

Skaffa hund, era jävlar

"Om du inte vill föda vaginalt, får du väl skaffa hund eller nåt". Ja, detta är en autentisk rubrik från DN - eller nästan autentisk (jag citerar ur minnet).

Japp, gott folk, Hanne Kjöller är tillbaka. Hennes knäppa misantropi fick visst inte plats under DN:s "vakna" U-sväng under migrantkrisen, men nu är högerspöket tillbaka med råge. Den här gången attackerar hon kvinnor som vill föda med kejsarsnitt.

Och nej, jag har inte heller läst artikeln, men jag vet hur hon brukade låta när det begav sig, så jag kan tänka mig...

Suck.

Skyfall

Credit: Malene Thyssen

Funny how agnosticism always relates to the Christian God. I never met an Allah agnostic, a Buddha Amithaba agnostic or a Rama-with-the-ax agnostic. 

Personally, I´m a Teutatis agnostic. 

I mean, although it´s highly unlikely that the sky could fall down upon our heads at any moment while strolling the streets of Great Lutetia, there is a non-zero probability that it *could* happen. Btw, the sky could fall down upon us for other (and more likely) reasons, but that´s another discussion. 

Take care, kiddos, and see you all next week! 

Hurra för Brexit! DN svänger, biff från Brasilien nästa?

Det verkar som att U-svängen redan är i full gång. Apokalypsen är inställd, nu hurrar vi för Brexit och höjer våra profiter istället! Vågar man gissa att DN snart börjar förespråka import av biff från Bolsonarien också?

Svenskt snus kan bli vinnare efter Brexit

Graham Hancocks triumf

Intressant artikel, men författarinnan reflekterar aldrig över det märkliga faktum att "människor med djurhuvuden" verkar vara ett oerhört vanligt motiv förknippat med shamanism, men även vissa senare religioner. Man ser tydligen sånt skit om man trippar med ayahuasca också. Finns det något slags arketyper, trots allt? Eller finns faktiskt andar med djurhuvuden? :P 

Asiens grottmålningar kom före Europas 

Rudolf Steiner and Parvus won´t like this one

It was Germany, stupid. 

World War I: The real reason why the war happened

The end of American Empire

Time to link to “The National Interest” again. Michael Lind explains why the age of American Empire is over. The article is quite good, but it does have a few peculiar blind spots. For instance, it hardly mentions Russia. Nor does climate change exist in Lind´s universe. And yet, climate change will upset the geopolitical apple cards even more, for instance by making huge swaths of the Arctic Sea ice free. Still, a good introduction to the new world situation. 

Can America share its superpower status?

The lesbians did it

“The Progressive Era” is a doorstopper volume containing writings by Murray Rothbard on this particular period in American history (which to Rothbard also included the New Deal). Some of the material has been published previously in various libertarian journals. Other pieces were intended as chapters of a new work, a work Rothbard never finished. “The Progressive Era” was published posthumously in 2017 by the Ludwig von Mises Institute. I readily admit that Rothbard´s extreme brand of libertarianism doesn´t appeal to me. It also strikes me as contradictory. Rothbard supports open borders and identifies heavily with the Catholic and German Lutheran communities who supported the old style Democratic Party, but these people were hardly “libertarian”. One sure wonders what Rothbard said about the more recent mass immigration of Hispanics and Muslims to the United States? Especially since he supports alien voting rights… Many of Rothbard´s positions would make more sense if he had been a conservative communitarian, but even then, it´s difficult to see how a nation with 100+ such communities could possible survive in the long run, especially if it has a very weak central power. I sometimes get the impression that there isn´t *anything* (except government intervention and lesbianism) Rothbard isn´t willing to defend, from slumlords and child labor to misleading labeling and Tammany Hall politics. That´s “laissez faire” for you, right there.


[A RELIGIOUS CONFLICT?]

That being said, “The Progressive Era” does contain interesting takes on a number of topics. Rothbard believes that the conflict between the Federalist-Whig-Republican tradition of cartelized Big Business or Big Government meddling into the life of the ordinary citizen, on the one hand, and the Jeffersonian-Jacksonian-Bourbon Democratic tradition of “individual liberty” and laissez faire economics, on the other, is at bottom a *religious* conflict. What Rothbard calls Pietists or sometimes “Pietistic Liberal Protestants” (PLPs) were pitted against Liturgicals (or rather Liturgicals and something we could call Creedals). 

The Pietists supported the Republicans and their moral crusades to remake all of society by stamping out sin, both individual vices such as drinking alcohol and political sins such as slavery. This moralistic holier-than-thou busy-body attitude rather seamlessly morphed into authoritarian social engineering of a liberal or socialistic slant. Both were based on the idea that the government has the duty to stamp out sin and injustice. Hence progressivism is really a secularized “left” version of Pietistic postmillennial Protestantism. Even feminism is part of this context, since it began as a “Christian” crusade against the saloon, the traditional gathering-place of patriarchal men. The typical Yankees of New England, who began as authoritarian Puritans, were Pietistic under Rothbard´s definition. So were many Scandinavian Lutherans. By contrast, the German Lutherans and most Catholics were Liturgicals, wanted to keep the government out of their communities, and believed that salvation was a private (or perhaps communitarian) matter solely mediated through their respective Churches, not through government institutions. Traditional creedal Calvinists had a similar attitude as the Liturgicals. 

Rothbard believes that a detailed analysis of 19^th century election results showed that the Republican-Democratic split usually followed the Pietist-Liturgical divide. In the same city, two equally poor working class districts could vote for two different candidates depending on religious attitude. Democrats did better (or even better) among hard line German Lutherans (yes, that would be the notorious Missouri Synod) than among German Lutherans who were more soft line, and so on. 

The fall of the old style Democrats came in 1896, when the Democrats had been taken over by the agrarian populists around William Jennings Bryan, who spouted a Pietistic program and hence attracted droves of such activists and voters to the Democratic banner, scaring away all Liturgicals except the Irish, who preferred to stay in the Democratic camp due to their control of a number of city-wide political machines. Meanwhile, the Republicans under William McKinley moved to the center, thereby attracting the declutched Liturgicals and winning the election. Unfortunately for any believer in laissez faire, neither party promoted it from then on, the new style Democrats continuing with their Pietistic campaigns under the ever-defeated perennial presidential candidate Bryan, while the “centrist” Republicans turned out to be hard boiled centralizers, cartelizers, imperialists and – surprise – authoritarian social engineers, and hence pretty “Pietistic” themselves, especially under one Teddy Roosevelt. They probably didn´t really believe in the gold standard, either…


[THE LESBIANS DID IT!] 

When Rothbard is at his most frivolous, he essentially claims that the American welfare state (please, *what* welfare state?) was the work of “lesbians”, that is feminist activists who apparently had this particular sexual orientation to a very large degree. Eleanor Roosevelt is one of the few exceptions – she is rather “our first bisexual First Lady”. OK, Murray, whatever you say. After a cold shower or two, the author does say some interesting things about the women´s movement, too, although they will probably rub the (post)modern feminists the wrong way! The early feminist movement had strong nativist and classist traits, attacking mass immigration (since the immigrant males were often more patriarchal than the Anglo men – sounds familiar?) and the foreign-born working class. The feminists, who were “upper class” according to the author, resented being treated as second class citizens, while immigrant males were automatically given the right to vote. It´s interesting to note that the votes of immigrant males often defeated proposals to extend the franchise to women when put to a referendum, thereby proving a thing or two, but nothing (post)modern feminists want to hear, of course. 

As already noted, the attacks of the Women Christian Temperance Union on saloons (sometimes literal attacks) weren´t simply fanaticized responses to the sin of drinking improperly labeled whiskey. The saloon was the all-male social hub of many immigrant communities, and the saloon-owner was often also a Democratic Party ward-heeler, making saloons politically important, too. It was in the saloon that the Democrats convinced or cajoled the local males into voting Democrat. When the Pietistic moral crusaders (who Rothbard see as proto-feminists) attacked the saloons and/or demanded state legislation against the selling of alcohol, they were striking a blow against the political power of patriarchal structures in the immigrant (often Catholic) districts. Of course, they were also promoting the Republicans over the Democrats…

Rothbard believes that female suffrage was a sheer political maneuver from certain interested parties, rather than a genuine concession to struggling oppressed women. This is most obvious in Utah, one of the first US territories to allow women the right to vote. Here, the reason was to bolster the domination of the Mormon-exclusive People´s Party (hardly a lesbian matriarchy) at a time when non-Mormon migrants settled in the territory in increasing numbers. In Wyoming, where many of the old settlers were Yankees, female suffrage was introduced to ensure old settler control of the legislature as against more transient new settlers. In both Utah and Wyoming, the new settlers had often left their families back East, or didn´t have any, and these all-male constituencies could therefore be defeated at the polls by enlarged male-and-female old settler constituencies. Rothbard believes that a similar scheme was underway all over the United States. If women were given the right to vote, the Pietistic candidates would gain most female votes, since Catholic women usually didn´t vote at all.


[THEODORE ROOSEVELT: THE FIRST PROGRESSIVE]

Another topic dealt with extensively in “The Progressive Era” is the politics of our favorite US president, Theodore Roosevelt, magnanimously dubbed “the first progressive” by Rothbard. Less magnanimously and more maliciously, Mr R implies that McKinley was assassinated on TR´s orders! To Rothbard, Theodore Roosevelt´s progressive regulations were really a form of forced cartelization of the US industry. This explains the otherwise curious fact that the largest capitalists actually *supported* the administration. Federal regulations made life harder for smaller and medium-sized firms, and also for dangerous innovators, while the large businesses would remain unscathed – since they could afford the regulations, while smaller businesses could not. Thus, federal regulation is a way for monopolistic capitalist businesses to do away with pesky competition and cartelize their respective industries. And not just businesses – the banking interests were busy working backstage to create a central bank dominated by them, something they didn´t succeed in doing until the Democratic administration of Woodrow Wilson (who was just as “progressive” as Teddy Roosevelt). 

Even TR´s much celebrated conservation measures were really undertaken on behalf of Big Business, or so Rothbard believes. By setting aside huge amounts of unused land as a federal reserve, the price of all other land (now a scarce resource) sharply rose, which of course benefited its owners (wealthy Republican donors?). Conservation also benefitted the railway interests, since land around the railways was exempted from government confiscation. This forced settlers to buy land for their farms from the railroad companies (which of course hiked the prices). Rothbard doesn´t give much for the trust-busting activities of the TR and Taft administrations. With a few exceptions, he believes that the trust-busting followed a pattern. Theodore Roosevelt was closely allied with the Morgan banking interest, while William Howard Taft was more lined up with the Rockefellers (so was FDR later). The trust-busting usually hit the capitalist group which *didn´t* support the sitting president…

In a concluding chapter, Rothbard sharply attacks Herbert Hoover, who in his opinion was a super-regulator rather than a proponent of laissez faire. To the author, Hoover´s policies were actually quite similar to those of both Wilson and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The difference – which proved crucial in the end – was that Hoover couldn´t accept wholesale federal coercion of the business community. Instead of such “fascism”, Hoover believed that all regulatory measures must at bottom be voluntary. FDR believed otherwise and the rest, as they say, is history.

[WHAT WAS THE PROGRESSIVE ERA?]

So what was the Progressive Era? I suppose it was a nativist-imperialist form of neo-mercantilism inspired by Pietistic Postmillenial Protestantism and German Kathedersozialismus incorporating authoritarian social engineering and collaboration between Big Business and Even Bigger Government. While dominated by an alliance of bankers, industrialists and “progressive” Anglo politicians, it attracted middle class intellectuals who saw it as a third way between “anarchic” and “wasteful” free market capitalism and revolutionary socialism. And while Roth mentions it only in passing, one of the system´s functions was to appease and control an increasingly restive working class by co-opting Big Labor.

In other words, the Progressive Era was simply the modern phase of capitalism, in which laissez faire and a weak government is replaced by large scale production and a strong national administration, while the establishment decides to give the native workers a slice of the pie to avoid too much class conflict. Behold, really existing Social Democracy!

Wtf, I love the Progressive Era now.

Condensed and retold

“The Nationalistic and Religious Lectures of Swami Vivekananda” is a somewhat problematic book, since the lectures have been “condensed and retold” by Swami Tapasyananda, a leading member of the Ramakrishna Mission (Vivekananda´s ministry). We are never told exactly what this means. Condensed, how? What does “retold” even mean? Tapasyananda wasn´t a contemporary of Vivekananda. The book seems to be a teaser trailer to Vivekananda´s Collected Works – let´s hope they are unabridged! With the risk of sounding disrespectful, I have to say that these lectures (at least as retold) are also incredibly boring. But then, Vivekananda wasn´t a crazy saint in contrast to his peculiar master Sri Ramakrishna.

Vivekananda (1863-1902) became famous after giving a highly acclaimed speech at the Chicago World Parliament of Religions in 1893. In it, he painted Hinduism as a tolerant religion able to embrace or encompass all the others. Vivekananda was one of the first Hindu gurus who disseminated his message in the West, but there are also suspicions that his message really *was* Occidental in character, Vivekananda essentially being a liberal Protestant in Hindu garb, whose esoteric practice was a highly revised version of Yoga. For more on this, see “A History of Modern Yoga” by Elizabeth de Michelis.

Be that as it may, Vivekananda was a reformer exoterically, too. In his lectures, he makes a distinction between the ritual Vedic scriptures, which he regards as having fallen into abeyance, and the Upanishads, which are still normative. All other Hindu scriptures, such as the Puranas, must be interpreted according to the Vedas, which (of course) means mostly according to the Upanishads. Apart from the Upanishads, with their mystical and pantheistic message far removed from caste and purity laws, Vivekananda really only recognizes the Bhagavad-Gita. It is this core Hinduism, to coin a term, which is the religion Vivekananda wants India to adopt. Somebody might consider it a bowdlerized version. While calling for modernization and attacking really existing Hinduism as “a kitchen religion” (obsessed with purity laws), Vivekananda fears complete secularization. It would destroy India, since India´s only raison d´être is its unique form of spirituality. He seems to be calling for a new India based on tolerant reform Hinduism. Caste privileges are also attacked, Vivekananda saying that only people who actually live like ascetic and learned priests are true Brahmins. Presumably, most “Brahmins” in Bharata have other pastimes…

Vivekananda´s main theological selling point is the tolerance or pluralism of his reform Hinduism, with its “scientific” nature perhaps being second. Since everything is Brahman (the impersonal world-spirit), all religions are in some sense “true”, their gods and holy men all being manifestations of this Brahman. God reveals himself according to the culture and spiritual development of each nation. At the highest level of spiritual accomplishment, however, Advaita Vedanta (pantheist monism) is true. All other systems are lower stepping stones to this absolute truth. Vivekananda tries to harmonize the two main strands within Hinduism: worship of a personal god and the mystical quest for Brahman. He also attempts a harmonization of the different “yogas”, such as karma-yoga, jnana-yoga and bhakti-yoga. In this, he is of course harking back to the Bhagavad-Gita and also to his master Ramakrishna (for more on this, see my review of “Sri Ramakrishna: Life and Teachings”, also by Swami Tapasyananda).

Vivekananda at no point attacks “idolatry”, rather defending it from its Christian and secular detractors, simply giving it a more philosophically sophisticated justification. Although Brahman alone is real, humans can´t approach the Divine in this way. Humans need personified deities. Even better are the avatars, actual living persons who perfectly reflect the Divine in all their actions and words. Indeed, most humans can´t move closer to Brahman without first worshipping an earthly master. Jesus, Buddha and Ramakrishna are examples of such. Here, the reformer sounds distinctly old fashioned! He also has a problem with Buddhism, perhaps because it (or its modernized versions) are so similar to his own brand of Advaita. At the same time, he is close to what I presume is the orthodox Hindu and Indian nationalist take on Buddhism: that it was a heresy adopted by foreign barbarian tribes invading and weakening India.

I get the impression that Vivekananda sometimes indulges in a kind of “reverse Orientalism”. He depicts the Hindus as gentle, peaceful, long suffering and immensely spiritual – apparently a common stereotype at the time (presumably a colonialist one). Rather than seeing this as proof of the effete nature of Hindus, Vivekananda turns it into something positive. It means that the new India won´t become an aggressive great power, just as India never invaded anyone else in the past. Today, these words – perhaps directed at Western or Westernized audiences – sound idealist in the extreme, and they probably sounded strange even at the time they were uttered, except maybe for hopeless dreamers in California or Chicago…

As for science, Vivekananda´s strategy is to simply bypass the breakthroughs of 19^th century science, which strongly suggested that religion was simply wrong, Darwinian evolution being a case in point. Christian missionaries often argued that the historical character of their religion proved it was true, at which Vivekananda shrewdly responded that the non-historical character of his religion proved *it* true. Christianity is dependent on Jesus and the Bible actually being historically accurate, and that veracity was challenged by modern Western science. Advaita Vedanta by contrast isn´t dependent on the Vedas or the Puranas being historically accurate, since Advaita deals with phenomena transcending history, such as the relationship between the Atman (the spirit in each human) and Brahman (the world-spirit). This relationship can be proven by yogic practice here and now. Vivekananda therefore believed – quite rightly – that only an ahistorical religion would be able to withstand the challenges of secularism and scientism. As a complete side point, I noticed that the swami doesn´t believe in the Indo-European invasions. Presumably, this is a common position not just among Hindutva nationalists, but among Indians in general. They are wrong of course: get over it, the Urheimat was a kurgan north of the Black Sea…

It´s intriguing to reflect on the heritage of Vivekananda. Today, even Hindu nationalist Prime Minister Modi pretends to worship images of Vivekananda, yet something tells me Modi doesn´t see Islam or Christianity as legitimate avatars of the Dharma. Meanwhile, Vivekananda´s disciples at YouTube claim that he was Shiva! In a weird way, they therefore proved Swami´s point: yes, it seems most humans really do need to genuflect in front of an anthropomorphic savior figure. If that drives them closer to Brahman is perhaps another matter entirely…

If this is a short introduction, how in the name of Teutatis does the *long* one look like?

“Druids: A Very Short Introduction” by Barry Cunliffe is a very *long* introduction to, among other things, Druids. Nor is it that easy to read, due to its dense nature. The author is British and an Emeritus Professor of European Archeology. So this is how a professor abridges his chosen topic – he essentially doesn´t. LOL! Neolithic burial practices, Bronze Age and Iron Age ditto, every landfall of Greek explorer extraordinaire Pytheas, medieval Irish chronicles and the difference between the Posidonian and the Alexandrian tradition in ancient Greco-Roman writings about Druids are some of the subject-matters covered. For a moment, I almost suspected that the author wanted to take us on an extended journey through modern Freemasonry as well, but he resisted the temptation, instead giving us an overview of the Breton Neo-Druid revival! But yes, he does mention British and Welsh Neo-Druidry, too, even including a funny photo of a young Winston Churchill being initiated into a slightly burlesque Druid order. I mean, the guys surrounding Churchill look like Santa Claus, even spouting false white beards…

Most of Cunliffe´s book is on the serious side, though. What surprised me was his positive view of the ancient written sources – I assumed the paradigm is to disbelieve everything they ever said about the ancient Celts and their esoteric priesthood. Maybe it is. Perhaps Cunliffe belongs to an older generation? We are dealing with an *emeritus* professor, after all. The author reaches the conclusion that although Druidry isn´t Neolithic, and hence isn´t associated with Stonehenge or similar megalithic sites, it could nevertheless be very ancient, more specifically from the Early Bronze Age. Curiously, Cunliffe never mentions the Indo-European invasions. Doesn´t he believe they happened? He does believe that the Celts originated in Atlantic Europe and that the Iron Age La Tène culture was therefore at the periphery of the Celtic world. Druidry itself might very well be of British origin.

The author takes the Greek and Roman sources seriously, including the stereotypical description of white-gowned Druids with golden sickles gathering mistletoe from oaks. The story does sound logical from a religious viewpoint: oaks were sacred to the Celts, and mistletoe is rare on oak trees, so obviously mistletoe was seen as having mysterious properties when it *did* occasionally grow on oak. Nor are the stories of gruesome human sacrifice entirely made up. The ancient Celts did have a bizarre cult of severed heads, as proven by archeological digs. Many ancient sources ultimately go back to a now lost work by Pytheas of Massalia, a Greek explorer who sailed around Britain at some point during the 4^th century BC. He may have reached even further north.

According to Cunliffe, Celtic religion was lunar in character, while also having strong chthonic overtones. Or shall we say undertones? The most important deities were a sky god and an earth mother, with the former “civilizing” the latter by ritual sexual intercourse. Metamorphoses played an important role, too, but the author says little about this. The Druids, the Vates and the Bards were the priestly castes. The Druids were the philosophers, the teachers and the intermediaries between humans and gods. The Vates were augurs, while the Bards were poets skilled at both celebrating and attacking people through the power of their words and music. Some ancient sources note certain similarities between the Druids and the Greek Pythagoreans. Thus, both believed in an immortal soul and reincarnation. In the author´s mind, these ideas could have developed independently among the Celts, but another possibility is of course that the Druids were influenced by Pythagoreans, or even the other way around! In the Irish sources, we can see how Druidism is gradually replaced by Christianity, and how the Christians become progressively more hostile to their pagan precursors. Druids and Vates disappeared, while the Bards remained. The author doesn´t seem to believe that any authentic bardic tradition has survived into the modern world, however.

This means that all attempts to resurrect Druidism are essentially fake. The notorious 19^th century forger Iolo Morganwg is whipped by the book´s author several times, as is James Macpherson´s “Ossian”. Taliesin probably wasn´t real either. Since the book is supposed to be a “very short” introduction, he doesn´t go into the Arthurian mythology which, of course, includes Merlin. Cunliffe refers to modern “Druids” as “Neo-Pagan” and seem to have a slightly Wiccan understanding of their message. Above all, it´s Green and connected to hippies and new environmental sensibilities. That these groups are included in a work on the ancient Druids isn´t surprising. For starters, the Druid Revivalists gather every year at Stonehenge, often to the chagrin of the police or secular revelers. Also, Druidry has become part and parcel of British identity, and of course Celtic identities, too. What otherwise struck me when reading “Druids: A Very Short Introduction” is how stillborn Celtic Reconstructionism must be. There simply isn´t any way in which ancient Celtic religion can be meaningfully reconstructed today, since it was an integrated part of the cultural, social and political matrixes of the Celtic societies, forever gone. Even apart from that little detail with the severed heads…

With that, I end this very short review. Recommended.