George Orwell, spilling the beans

I'm having a ball reading Orwell essays. He's retarded, basically, but well informed and quite observantⁱ, which makes for an incredible combination. Literally, incredible, you sit there and wonder how is it that this whiny socialist came up with modernity's most notable indictment of socialism. Then you re-read what you just wrote and stop wondering, with a chuckle. Such are the benefits of blogging.

Anyway, even a rotten log can be used for kindling, and so let us try and carve the better parts out of the elephant shooter's notes.

SPILLING THE SPANISH BEANS (1937)

The Spanish war has probably produced a richer crop of lies than any event since the Great War of 1914-18, but I honestly doubt, in spite of all those hecatombs of nuns who have been raped and crucified before the eyes of DAILY MAIL reporters, whether it is the pro-Fascist newspapers that have done the most harm. It is the left-wing papers, the NEWS CHRONICLE and the DAILY WORKER, with their far subtler methods of distortion, that have prevented the British public from grasping the real nature of the struggle.

You know who else is raping nuns, well, not exactly nuns, but anyway, women (which are these days just as holy as any nun, if you listen to the cunt worshipping crowd) ? Why, IS-IS, of course. They're rapin' an' pillaging over there, then eager Western boys go over to take part, only to discover that meh, ipads don't even work! Such fraudulent revolution, this Arab Spring thing.ⁱⁱ

Generally Orwell has it : there's no rape truth ever receives quite like the one that it's getting right now. Isn't this somewhat strange ? What's stranger still is that it'd seem this truth chick has absolutely nothing against it! It's almost as if one's relationship with the truth is a rehash of one's relationship with his mother : the slut keeps getting "raped" by her husband, except a) she doesn't actually seem to either mind or more importantly suffer any ill effect from the experience, notwithstanding the plain conviction in the mind of the mental patient that the contrary will in fact be the case ; and b) every current occurence seems worse than all the previous ones - a sure fire indicator of psychogenic artefacts of perception. In short, if you'll pardon the pun, maybe truth ain't all it's cracked up to be ?

You recall that shocking revelation about art, wherein it was plainly stated that art is exactly and strictly what power deems it to be, that aesthetics do not in fact exist anymore than any other after-the-fact justifications and rationalizations exist, and otherwise art is merely the educative structure for a slave's spirit ? Well... art has a priviledged relationship with truth.

Which is to say that yes, there exists exactly no truth outside of what authority proclaims as such, or to quote,

"I know it is the moon."
"Nay, then you lie: it is the blessed sun."
"Then, God be bless'd, it is the blessed sun: but sun it is not, when you say it is not; and the moon changes even as your mind. What you will have it named, even that it is; and so it shall be so for Katharina."

That's all the truth there could ever possibily be.

Importantly, science is not in the business of obtaining truth, notwithstanding your infantile expectationsⁱⁱⁱ to the contrary, which explains why it's so easy and so common for pseudoscience to deliver it instead. In point of fact, whenever science is relied on to produce truth, the only result is its replacement posthaste with some sort of pseudoscience that can pretend to be science convincingly enough for your needs, while actually being what truth sources always are : authority.

The fact which these papers have so carefully obscured is that the Spanish Government (including the semi-autonomous Catalan Government) is far more afraid of the revolution than of the Fascists. It is now almost certain that the war will end with some kind of compromise, and there is even reason to doubt whether the Government, which let Bilbao fail without raising a finger, wishes to be too victorious; but there is no doubt whatever about the thoroughness with which it is crushing its own revolutionaries. For some time past a reign of terror–forcible suppression of political parties, a stifling censorship of the press, ceaseless espionage and mass imprisonment without trial–has been in progress. When I left Barcelona in late June the jails were bulging; indeed, the regular jails had long since overflowed and the prisoners were being huddled into empty shops and any other temporary dump that could be found for them. But the point to notice is that the people who are in prison now are not Fascists but revolutionaries; they are there not because their opinions are too much to the Right, but because they are too much to the Left. And the people responsible for putting them there are those dreadful revolutionaries at whose very name Garvin quakes in his galoshes–the Communists.

For one thing, fascism is exactly not right. As used in Germany, National Socialism was exactly what the name implies : a branch of socialism, differentiated from the ones fashionable at the time in Russia by rather minor, secondary points of flavour. As defined by Mussolini^iv, fascism is exactly opposite of right. Whether the other enemies of everything good in the world find this particular enemy palatable or not is akin to asking the lice in an infested bedroll whether it likes some other lice or not. I suppose I would care a lot more if I were a socialist myself. As I'm not, their problems seem temporary enough, lasting for as long as it takes me to burn their world.

For the other thing, stupidity is the one common factor uniting all forms and flavours of socialism, already attempted or yet to be devised. For this reason, people trying to govern putting socialists in prison is not unlike people trying to sleep murdering lice. Of course they would, governance is by its very definition and in every aspect of its practice an uphill struggle against the muddy hill of human stupidity. Simply putting all the socialists in prison is already half the work of any serious attempt at government.

These aside, the perspective is interesting. You wouldn't have heard of this point of view in your classes about the Spanish Civil War, would you have ? Much like you likely didn't hear about all the women opposing the female franchise in your pseudofeminism class. Funny how this scientific truth everyone peddles these days is so sensitive to context and so dependent on a good and proper packing of the samples, hm ?

Meanwhile the war against Franco continues, but, except for the poor devils in the front-line trenches, nobody in Government Spain thinks of it as the real war. The real struggle is between revolution and counter-revolution; between the workers who are vainly trying to hold on to a little of what they won in 1936, and the Liberal-Communist bloc who are so successfully taking it away from them. It is unfortunate that so few people in England have yet caught up with the fact that Communism is now a counter-revolutionary force; that Communists everywhere are in alliance with bourgeois reformism and using the whole of their powerful machinery to crush or discredit any party that shows signs of revolutionary tendencies. Hence the grotesque spectacle of Communists assailed as wicked 'Reds' by right-wing intellectuals who are in essential agreement with them. Mr Wyndham Lewis, for instance, ought to love the Communists, at least temporarily. In Spain the Communist-Liberal alliance has been almost completely victorious. Of all that the Spanish workers won for themselves in 1936 nothing solid remains, except for a few collective farms and a certain amount of land seized by the peasants last year; and presumably even the peasants will be sacrificed later, when there is no longer any need to placate them. To see how the present situation arose, one has got to look back to the origins of the civil war.

I'm entirely unsure whether the objection here is that some utopists dare try and build a different utopia from the one favoured by the author or what exactly.

Franco's bid for power differed from those of Hitler and Mussolini in that it was a military insurrection, comparable to a foreign invasion, and therefore had not much mass backing, though Franco has since been trying to acquire one. Its chief supporters, apart from certain sections of Big Business, were the land-owning aristocracy and the huge, parasitic Church. Obviously a rising of this kind will array against it various forces which are not in agreement on any other point. The peasant and the worker hate feudalism and clericalism; but so does the 'liberal' bourgeois, who is not in the least opposed to a more modern version of Fascism, at least so long as it isn't called Fascism. The 'liberal' bourgeois is genuinely liberal up to the point where his own interests stop. He stands for the degree of progress implied in the phrase 'la carrière ouverte aux talents'. For clearly he has no chance to develop in a feudal society where the worker and the peasant are too poor to buy goods, where industry is burdened with huge taxes to pay for bishops' vestments, and where every lucrative job is given as a matter of course to the friend of the catamite of the duke's illegitimate son. Hence, in the face of such a blatant reactionary as Franco, you get for a while a situation in which the worker and the bourgeois, in reality deadly enemies, are fighting side by side. This uneasy alliance is known as the Popular Front (or, in the Communist press, to give it a spuriously democratic appeal, People's Front). It is a combination with about as much vitality, and about as much right to exist, as a pig with two heads or some other Barnum and Bailey monstrosity.

It is altogether unclear if the Spanish peasant hated clericalism at all, or even understood enough of the world around him to even comprehend feudalism to any degree. It is certain that the Spanish peasant hated hunger, which was, even in 1930, altogether too common a feature of the landscape in that unhospitable, arid country overpopulated to all hell.

It is quite very likely that the burgeois (you know him today as the aspirational class) were then as they are now exactly as high minded and generally well meaning as their interest goes, which isn't all that far and certainly isn't in any sense revolutionary. Reddit of 1937 wanted anything and everything that didn't imply them changing in any substantial manner, such as you know, becoming that catamite. What, them ? Suck cock ? And as a result mature an' grow up ? Whence and wherefore! Wouldn't you rather listen to their opinions on matters and assure them they're not fat ? No ? SHAME ON YOU!

In any serious emergency the contradiction implied in the Popular Front is bound to make itself felt. For even when the worker and the bourgeois are both fighting against Fascism, they are not fighting for the same things; the bourgeois is fighting for bourgeois democracy, i.e. capitalism, the worker, in so far as he understands the issue, for Socialism.

Insofar as he understands the issue of him being stupid and pointless, he will be fighting for the system of the stupidly pointless. I can see it, sure. How unfortunate that not more stupid pointless dudes understand the issue.

And in the early days of the revolution the Spanish workers understood the issue very well. In the areas where Fascism was defeated they did not content themselves with driving the rebellious troops out of the towns; they also took the opportunity of seizing land and factories and setting up the rough beginnings of a workers' government by means of local committees, workers' militias, police forces, and so forth.

This is a very funny thing, to my experienced eye. Admire the cyclicity of it :

1. A slice of land exists, with some cattle on it, quadripedal and bipedal. It is owned by a person, and is valued at X.
2. The cattle rebels, and casts off the owner. The value of the land $slice is now X` ± C, where X' < X and C is a constant of which we know very little.
3. The cattle proclaims itself the new owner. The per-capita wealth of each head of cattle increases by X'/n, which exceeds the previous value (0).
4. The cattle throws a celebratory party^v, to the tune of expert witnesses and other scientists explaining how C could technically even be larger than X-X', and for all we know the + in ± isn't there just for mathematical formalism, but could in fact truthfully belong. Sure, why not, it's a party.
5. The downward march continues, X'' clearly < X'. The cattle is no longer in the position of some cattle that got something for nothing, which is from its narrow, bovine perspective a gain no matter how much was destroyed in the process. The cattle is instead in the position of cattle-owners now, and their ownership is dwindling which is a painful mental experience.
6. Rather than take the cock and grow up by it, the cattle prefers to remain cattle, and so the entire arrangement is dissolved spontaneously.
7. The "scientists" involved at 4 go into full blast mode about how 6 wasn't actually the free and willing decision of the cattle, but the result of variously ellaborate circumstances, conspiracies and poisonous catamites ; and about how X' wasn't really < X (most don't dispute that X'' < X', but again, catamites!) and on and on.
8. Idiots knowing about 1-6 through the venue of 7 exclusively go back to 1 and infinite hitpoint all over themselves.

Again : nobody wants to live in a world populated by little girls. Most of all, not the little girls in question. It always seems attractive, for all of half an hour, because you can eat as many cookies from the jar as you wish. Then the jar empties, and you discover that no, little girls can't bake cookies. At which point there's a lot of little girls running around in circles looking for mommy.

They made the mistake, however (possibly because most of the active revolutionaries were Anarchists with a mistrust of all parliaments), of leaving the Republican Government in nominal control. And, in spite of various changes in personnel, every subsequent Government had been of approximately the same bourgeois-reformist character. At the beginning this seemed not to matter, because the Government, especially in Catalonia, was almost powerless and the bourgeoisie had to lie low or even (this was still happening when I reached Spain in December) to disguise themselves as workers. Later, as power slipped from the hands of the Anarchists into the hands of the Communists and right-wing Socialists, the Government was able to reassert itself, the bourgeoisie came out of hiding and the old division of society into rich and poor reappeared, not much modified.

How was this possible ?

Think about it for a moment, Georgie boy! So, water normally flows downhill, except it was tricked into flowing uphill for a time. How ? And then, someone came and showed it the glory of flowing downhill again, which it did for all of five minutes, after which... conspirators ? catamites ? made it flow uphill again. Is this what you're proposing here ? Does it make any sense at all whatsoever ?

No, your mom wasn't squealing like a sow in heat because your dad forced her to. She did it because it's what she does, because she enjoys it, as repugnant and intolerable these facts may strike the inept infantile mind. The cunt's there to be fucked, and generally roughly, it's what it likes, it's how this thing called life goes. It may seem, superficially, and especially if you're a virgin, that the thing to do is not fuck it roughly, and actually not fuck it at all. This is nonsense of the prime degree.

The Anarchists in question, had they indeed made a mistake rather than you know, willingly drop their panties around the ankles in that most delicious invitation, would have made an inconsequential mistake that would have been immediately forgotten and never relevant. How was it that the government was able to reassert itself ?

Where I come from, this magical place called the Internet, government has never managed to matter, in spite of numerous attempts to reassert itself that all failed. Most credit card transactions today are Internet fraud. Most "secrets" of the various governments are known to us. Some agencies of MiniTruth tried a war on torrents, which yielded the most spectacular opening of that ministry's safes in history. Pretty much everyone that cares to can have whatever "banned" chemical compounds mailed to them within minutes. How come the government doesn't reassert itself, Georgie ?

There's a difference between utopia and reality, about the same kind of difference as between a fantasy and the girl next door.

Henceforward every move, except a few dictated by military emergency, was directed towards undoing the work of the first few months of revolution. Out of the many illustrations I could choose, I will cite only one, the breaking-up of the old workers' militias, which were organized on a genuinely democratic system, with officers and men receiving the same pay and mingling on terms of complete equality, and the substitution of the Popular Army (once again, in Communist jargon, 'People's Army'), modelled as far as possible on an ordinary bourgeois army, with a privileged officer-caste, immense differences of pay, etc. etc. Needless to say, this is given out as a military necessity, and almost certainly it does make for military efficiency, at least for a short period. But the undoubted purpose of the change was to strike a blow at equalitarianism. In every department the same policy has been followed, with the result that only a year after the outbreak of war and revolution you get what is in effect an ordinary bourgeois State, with, in addition, a reign of terror to preserve the status quo.

Could this be due to the fact that equalitarianism is the worst idea anyone ever had, and a system so generally repugnant, and in any practical implementation so idiotic that you can't really wish anything more than this upon your enemy ?

This process would probably have gone less far if the struggle could have taken place without foreign interference. But the military weakness of the Government made this impossible. In the face of France's foreign mercenaries they were obliged to turn to Russia for help, and though the quantity of arms supplied by Russia has been greatly exaggerated (in my first three months in Spain I saw only one Russian weapon, a solitary machine-gun), the mere fact of their arrival brought the Communists into power. To begin with, the Russian aeroplanes and guns, and the good military qualities of the international Brigades (not necessarily Communist but under Communist control), immensely raised the Communist prestige. But, more important, since Russia and Mexico were the only countries openly supplying arms, the Russians were able not only to get money for their weapons, but to extort terms as well. Put in their crudest form, the terms were: 'Crush the revolution or you get no more arms.' The reason usually given for the Russian attitude is that if Russia appeared to be abetting the revolution, the Franco-Soviet pact (and the hoped-for alliance with Great Britain) would be imperilled; it may be, also, that the spectacle of a genuine revolution in Spain would rouse unwanted echoes in Russia. The Communists, of course, deny that any direct pressure has been exerted by the Russian Government. But this, even if true, is hardly relevant, for the Communist Parties of all countries can be taken as carrying out Russian policy; and it is certain that the Spanish Communist Party, plus the right-wing Socialists whom they control, plus the Communist press of the whole world, have used all their immense and ever-increasing influence upon the side of counter-revolution.

Interesting historical tidbits, if we cease paying attention to the ceaseless "and then he made me open my mouth and eagerly slurp his cock and bob my head up and down moaning excitedly like a nympho that's not seen a tool in six years". Generally the efforts exerted towards peace by the beligerents before any war tend to be rapidly forgotten, especially should those beligerents happen to either lose or not end up on the list of our friends.

In the first half of this article I suggested that the real struggle in Spain, on the Government side, has been between revolution and counter-revolution; that the Government, though anxious enough to avoid being beaten by Franco, has been even more anxious to undo the revolutionary changes with which the outbreak of war was accompanied.

Any Communist would reject this suggestion as mistaken or wilfully dishonest. He would tell you that it is nonsense to talk of the Spanish Government crushing the revolution, because the revolution never happened; and that our job at present is to defeat Fascism and defend democracy. And in this connexion it is most important to see just how the Communist anti-revolutionary propaganda works. It is a mistake to think that this has no relevance in England, where the Communist Party is small and comparatively weak. We shall see its relevance quickly enough if England enters into an alliance with the U.S.S.R.; or perhaps even earlier, for the influence of the Communist Party is bound to increase–visibly is increasing–as more and more of the capitalist class realize that latter-day Communism is playing their game.

This is an extremely astute point. Latter day communism did in fact play the game of degenerate "capitalism", which is to say, capitalism as implemented by the catamites mentioned afore - a class of cattle not able to on their own produce anything of any value, but cursed with the misfortune of not having been born heifers and veals in the house of their cow mother. Instead they were born relatively free men in the houses of their certainly free fathers, who had created a free country. The desperation to maintain that pretense to capitalism is fundamentally the same story as the communists' efforts to maintain their various pretenses, and so of course both classes of idiots rapidly found a common tongue.

Which is exactly what you're seeing today, under the guise of "government" and "leadership" among the white race there's nothing but idiots aspiring to pretend like they're capitalists and idiots aspiring to pretend like they're communists. They can do it at the same time, too, much like your nine year old son can pretend he's a cowboy fireman. Pretense is malleable like that, which is pretty much its only positive quality.

Shocking, isn't it, just how prophetic Orwell acually is, by his nature somehow, even in spite of himself ? It may be mostly due to our penchant to read things that aren't there, much like you probably imagine animals have a soul, like any furry.

Broadly speaking, Communist propaganda depends upon terrifying people with the (quite real) horrors of Fascism. It also involves pretending–not in so many words, but by implication–that Fascism has nothing to do with capitalism. Fascism is just a kind of meaningless wickedness, an aberration, 'mass sadism', the sort of thing that would happen if you suddenly let loose an asylumful of homicidal maniacs. Present Fascism in this form, and you can mobilize public opinion against it, at any rate for a while, without provoking any revolutionary movement. You can oppose Fascism by bourgeois 'democracy, meaning capitalism. But meanwhile you have got to get rid of the troublesome person who points out that Fascism and bourgeois 'democracy' are Tweedledum and Tweedledee. You do it at the beginning by calling him an impracticable visionary. You tell him that he is confusing the issue, that he is splitting the anti-Fascist forces, that this is not the moment for revolutionary phrase-mongering, that for the moment we have got to fight against Fascism without inquiring too closely what we are fighting for. Later, if he still refuses to shut up, you change your tune and call him a traitor. More exactly, you call him a Trotskyist.

This is amusing in the perspective of a century.

So, communism has nothing to do with stalinism, the theory goes, because well... meaningless wickedness, right ? An aberration. Asylumful of homicidal maniacs on the loose.

And communism has nothing to do with fascism, either. And so on and so forth. Burgeois "democracy" aka socialism, and socialism, and socialism, and that other socialism, and national-socialism, and socialism and so on and so forth are in point of fact the same thing, yes. I hope you're not about to say that I'm splitting the anti-idiotarian forces, are you ?

And what is a Trotskyist? This terrible word–in Spain at this moment you can be thrown into jail and kept there indefinitely, without trial, on the mere rumour that you are a Trotskyist–is only beginning to be bandied to and fro in England. We shall be hearing more of it later. The word 'Trotskyist' (or 'Trotsky-Fascist') is generally used to mean a disguised Fascist who poses as an ultra-revolutionary in order to split the left-wing forces. But it derives its peculiar power from the fact that it means three separate things. It can mean one who, like Trotsky, wished for world revolution; or a member of the actual organization of which Trotsky is head (the only legitimate use of the word); or the disguised Fascist already mentioned. The three meanings can be telescoped one into the other at will. Meaning No. 1 may or may not carry with it meaning No. 2, and meaning No. 2 almost invariably carries with it meaning No. 3. Thus: 'XY has been heard to speak favourably of world revolution; therefore he is a Trotskyist; therefore he is a Fascist.' In Spain, to some extent even in England, ANYONE professing revolutionary Socialism (i.e. professing the things the Communist Party professed until a few years ago) is under suspicion of being a Trotskyist in the pay of Franco or Hitler.

Tsk tsk. A new hero emerges ? Yet again ?

It would seem the ability of "scientists" to conjure heroes out of historical people is unbound.

The accusation is a very subtle one, because in any given case, unless one happened to know the contrary, it might be true. A Fascist spy probably WOULD disguise himself as a revolutionary. In Spain, everyone whose opinions are to the Left of those of the Communist Party is sooner or later discovered to be a Trotskyist or, at least, a traitor. At the beginning of the war the POUM, an opposition Communist party roughly corresponding to the English ILP., was an accepted party and supplied a minister to the Catalan Government, later it was expelled from the Government; then it was denounced as Trotskyist; then it was suppressed, every member that the police could lay their hands on being flung into jail.

Until a few months ago the Anarcho-Syndicalists were described as 'working loyally' beside the Communists. Then the Anarcho-Syndicalists were levered out of the Government; then it appeared that they were not working so loyally; now they are in the process of becoming traitors. After that will come the turn of the left-wing Socialists. Caballero, the left-wing Socialist ex-premier, until May 1937 the idol of the Communist press, is already in outer darkness, a Trotskyist and 'enemy of the people'. And so the game continues. The logical end is a régime in which every opposition party and newspaper is suppressed and every dissentient of any importance is in jail. Of course, such a régime will be Fascism. It will not be the same as the fascism Franco would impose, it will even be better than Franco's fascism to the extent of being worth fighting for, but it will be Fascism. Only, being operated by Communists and Liberals, it will be called something different.

I think the convention is "democratic republic of X".

Meanwhile, can the war be won? The Communist influence has been against revolutionary chaos and has therefore, apart from the Russian aid, tended to produce greater military efficiency. If the Anarchists saved the Government from August to October 1936, the Communists have saved it from October onwards. But in organizing the defence they have succeeded in killing enthusiasm (inside Spain, not outside). They made a militarized conscript army possible, but they also made it necessary.

What a great point this is.

It is significant that as early as January of this year voluntary recruiting had practically ceased. A revolutionary army can sometimes win by enthusiasm, but a conscript army has got to win with weapons, and it is unlikely that the Government will ever have a large preponderance of arms unless France intervenes or unless Germany and Italy decide to make off with the Spanish colonies and leave Franco in the lurch. On the whole, a deadlock seems the likeliest thing.

And does the Government seriously intend to win? It does not intend to lose, that is certain. On the other hand, an outright victory, with Franco in flight and the Germans and Italians driven into the sea, would raise difficult problems, some of them too obvious to need mentioning. There is no real evidence and one can only judge by the event, but I suspect that what the Government is playing for is a compromise that would leave the war situation essentially in being. All prophecies are wrong, therefore this one will be wrong, but I will take a chance and say that though the war may end quite soon or may drag on for years, it will end with Spain divided up, either by actual frontiers or into economic zones. Of course, such a compromise might be claimed as a victory by either side, or by both.

This sounds to me like the germ of the idea that'll yield "but we've always been at war with eustralasia" a decade later. Socialism aka burgeois democracy, alongside socialism aka fascism (national-socialism), alongside socialism aka trotskysim (international socialism / world revolution / whatever you wish to call it) can indeed coexist as perpetual kingdoms at war, and indeed if at all possible they would actually prefer to. Because for as long as your preoccupations are whether to vote red or blue, you are quite unlikely to go there by yourself and hang the whole lot. You might do it once you see me start, which is why all socialists are so terrified of actual people, but otherwise, for as long as you can be kept idly debating sterile nonissues the spiral of doom can continue unabated, towards ever lower living standards presented as ever greater virtual achievements.

How about alternatively you cast off all that bullshit about "equality", nonsense you don't even actually believe in ? How about instead spending all your time in the servicing of the pretense that you're things you aren't, you simply focus on being the things that you actually are ? How about instead of the slavery of rights, you embrace the freedom of slavery ?

Maybe next year, huh.

All that I have said in this article would seem entirely commonplace in Spain, or even in France. Yet in England, in spite of the intense interest the Spanish war has aroused, there are very few people who have even heard of the enormous struggle that is going on behind the Government lines. Of course, this is no accident. There has been a quite deliberate conspiracy (I could give detailed instances) to prevent the Spanish situation from being understood. People who ought to know better have lent themselves to the deception on the ground that if you tell the truth about Spain it will be used as Fascist propaganda.

It is easy to see where such cowardice leads. If the British public had been given a truthful account of the Spanish war they would have had an opportunity of learning what Fascism is and how it can be combated. As it is, the News Chronicle version of Fascism as a kind of homicidal mania peculiar to Colonel Blimps bombinating in the economic void has been established more firmly than ever. And thus we are one step nearer to the great war 'against Fascism' (cf. 1914, 'against militarism') which will allow Fascism, British variety, to be slipped over our necks during the first week.

Interesting, so there was an anti-German conspiracy in the English press already in full swing in 1937 ? So the man was actually right when he was saying it ? Wait a second, Hitler telling the truth ? Isn't that a mind bomb ?

The historical details are, as always, the best reason to read. Who among you remembered that yes, in 1914 the bloodiest war in history was fought by "democratic" socialism against "democratic" socialism in the name of... destroying militarism ? Hm ?

1. This is a matter we'll be getting back to. [↩]
2. Whoops, did I get the wrong one ? Was AS the good IS ? [↩]
3. They are infantile expectations. During the World Cup, right after Brazil was eliminated, the locals spent a collective man-millenium chanting “Brasil, decime qué se siente / tener en casa a tu papá". In English this comes to "Brazil, tell me how it feels to have your daddy in the house." The inquest is facetious, they know exactly what it feels like. So do you, in spite of your pretense to the contrary.

   You think, like all adolescent boys always and everywhere, that you shouldn't be "pushed around", that you're too special, important and generally speaking cool to be told what's what, and especially by an - gasp! - adult male. Not only because that'd mean you aren't an adult male (which apparently is fine as a being, but is intolerable as a knowledge), but most importantly - oh horror of horrors! - because the sexual overtones implicit might actually mean you are - Jove lend us strength in our hour of need - A WOMAN.

   That's right. You might be a slut just like your fucking mother. You might enjoy the cvasi-daily rape just like your mother did. Quick, bleach, unreading dust, take it off take it off!!!

   So yeah, your infantile expectations as to your own place and role in the world force this pretense that the source of truth is not a cock being rammed down your throat, and that truth itself does not in fact take the sensible shape of a cock, being rammed down your throat. It's daintier, it's like, you know, science.

   Except it's not. Science is in the business of fiction, the difference between nonfiction and fiction isn't in the manner, it's in the degree, which is why both kinds of literature take so well to books and generally written mediums. Which is also why one years' science becomes another years' fiction, and one years' fiction becomes another years' science.

   Science is merely literature built on a particular system of willing suspension of disbelief. For fiction, the author says "Jane is a little lamb" and you suspend that part in your head going "what fucking lamb". For nonfiction, the author says "Five is the number of items in this sack" and you suspend that other part in your head going "what fucking number". Math doesn't exist to any further degree than literary characters exist, and sure, there's enduring patterns in both. In both. To the same degree, in the same manner, because in spite of the infinite space of possibilities, the conceptual abilities of mankind are severely limited and essentially circular.

   Your ideas of math are "supported by the evidence" and true in the same exact manner Dickens' ideas of literature are "supported by the evidence" and true. The concept of number recurs in human writings exactly the same way and exactly for the same reasons the miles gloriosus recurs in human writings. There's no substantial difference there, and while any work of fiction may be true, actual truth, as a thing in itself rather than a property bestowed upon figments of your imagination, remains entirely unrelated.

   Similarly, you could say any thing may be valuable. Sure, if there's someone rich saying so. Then and only then whatever thing would be valuable. [↩]

4. "Against individualism, the Fascist conception is for the State;" [↩]
5. I'm going to come back to this, too. [↩]