AGAINST THE GREAT RESET: 'History under the Great Reset'

Today and tomorrow, The Pipeline concludes its series of excerpts the essays contained in Against the Great Reset: 18 Theses Contra the New World Order, which was published on October 18 by Bombardier Books and distributed by Simon and Schuster, and available now at the links.

Part VI: THE INEFFABLE

Excerpt from "History under The Great Reset," by Jeremy Black

History’s place at the fore of culture wars is no surprise. The destruction of alternative values, of the sense of continuity, an appreciation of complexities, and of anything short of a self-righteous presentist internationalism, is central to the attempt at a ‘Great Reset.’ Moreover, in a variety of forms, including cultural Marxism and, particularly and very noisily at present, critical race theory, such a “reset” is part of a total assault on the past, one that is explicitly designed to lead the present and determine the future.

This assault is a long-term process that owed much to the Marxist side in the Cold War that began in 1917 and continued until the fall of the Soviet bloc in 1989–1991, but this process has been revived and given new direction in recent years. The relentlessness of the struggle; the Leninist approach; that the core true believers and committed will lead the rest; that there is to be no compromise, no genuine debate; and that the end result must be power for its own sake attacks, through prejudging groups as inherently racist, the notion of every human being having intrinsic value, a notion that is central to the Judeo-Christian tradition. In part, this revival reflects the extent to which those who were the rebels of the late 1960s are now very much in the driving seats of intellectual and cultural would-be direction, and thereby able to move from protest to proscription. Thus, the “long march through the institutions” beloved of the Left has succeeded.

In part, this was because conservatives devoted insufficient attention to trying to contest this march. In particular, the degree to which institutions and companies controlled by, and for, the “soft Left” could become the means for propaganda, indeed indoctrination, by the “hard Left,” while appreciated by many right-wing commentators, was given far too little attention by conservative governments. This was true of Reagan/Thatcher/Bush Senior, all of whom understandably focused on international relations and economic affairs, including the development of neoliberalism, and then again of Bush Junior/Cameron.

Now on sale.

Other issues thus came to the fore but so also, in a lack of adequate response to the culture wars waged by the Left, did an understandable wish not to use the power of the state in order to limit the autonomy of institutions such as museums and universities. Neither did they come up with any other solution to the problem. That approach, however, left conservatism at a serious disadvantage, one that has become increasingly apparent and one that there is still a difficulty in facing.

This situation was very much of concern before the storm of protest and aggressive virtue signalling associated with the ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement of 2020. However, the latter helped rapidly to drive forward the pre-existing tendency, not least by leading many organisations, institutions, and companies to endorse and adopt attitudes and policies that were at best tendentious and at worst extremely damaging to any practice of rational enquiry. Thus, a survey circulated by Oxfam in June 2021 to its staff in Britain stated that racism was deeply embedded in society and that all echelons of power, to some degree, exist to serve whiteness (whether by legacy, the presence of neocolonialism, or cultural imperialism).

Leaving aside the question of what whiteness means, and the difficulty of determining how somebody thinks, which is a crucial aspect of charges of racism, the past is defined in terms of a hostile legacy. The emphasis throughout is on whiteness and blackness in oppositional terms and with a clear primacy for both across time. This is fundamentally ahistorical as it acts to downplay all other identities and causes of tension, most notably rivalry within these supposed opposites—for example, the tribal conflicts within Africa that were the major sources of the Atlantic slave trade, and what also can be seen as tribal conflicts in Europe. Indeed, the role of tribalism is seriously downplayed by the drive for a racist dichotomy in analysis. There is an endless number of aspects of a question, and the ambition ought to be to cover as many aspects as possible, not to take one a priori.

The abandonment of any support for rational enquiry, indeed, was unsurprising, as there was an explicitly anti-Enlightenment argument at play, and notably and aggressively so with critical race theory. This theory acted to deny rationality, presenting it somehow as racist and an imperialising project, whatever that is held to mean. This theory was a deeply ironic ally for the companies and others that offered endorsement as their entire ethos was based on rational planning. In a resumption of the postmodernist hash, objectivity has become a term of abuse and objection, as has teaching in a linear fashion. The “progressive” or “woke” agenda can be advanced by such a wide coalition because all its elements have adopted the social constructivist position that facts are irrelevant or disposable.

Thus, for many, history becomes part of a continuum in which gender activists can adopt the mantra of “transwomen are women” because they dismiss the fact of biology as subject to the social construct of gender. Race activists can seek to do the same. Moreover, data suggesting that the white working class faces difficulties is ignored because it does not fit with the prevailing socially constructed view that white men are the “problem” and oppress others. In the same way, history activists, a category that includes many history academics but does not deserve the designation “historians,” can construct an account of the past that is not supported by evidence but is how they want it to be. If everything can be constructed on the basis of whim, history as a discipline is in real peril.

As a related point, education in the West increasingly becomes a matter of emphasising therapy and feeling better. In line with this, the desire by some academics to ‘self-medicate’ intellectually and feel better has become the motivator for decolonization of the curriculum. Such decolonisation is at core both political and a therapeutic initiative (larded with the language of “feeling safe”), which enables the decolonisers to feel virtuous. Critical race theory says nothing new in so far as it points, as when it was advanced in the 1970s, to an interconnectivity among many elements contributing to the historical animosity toward African Americans. More seriously, the theory has a bleak outlook and appears to state that there has been little or no progress in ameliorating racial discrimination. This is mistaken. Moreover, in applying the past to the present, the theory is misconstrued and ossified, falling into the ethnic-blame fallacy trap in its focus on retroactive, collective ethnic guilt. This was initially an American phenomenon reacting to specifically American societal and historical problems. This element makes its simple adoption in Britain and elsewhere in the West all the more problematic. In part, this adoption is the result of an increasingly monoglot and ahistorical society. Using empire to make some sort of bridge is problematic not in small part due to the “transracial” alliances involved in empire. For Britain, this was prominent in the case of slave-sellers, while the British empire in Asia was essentially an Anglo-Indian enterprise.

The wash of protest in 2020 was given concrete form by being taken on board in mission statements, hiring policies, and other such mutually supporting practices that are backed by the designation and filling of new posts. Thus, ideology was focused accordingly. In Britain, as a result, historical issues, such as the slave trade, empire, and the reputation of Winston Churchill, have received attention to an unaccustomed degree, and history of a type was thrust into public debate. However, as an empirical basis for critique, “history wars” has scarcely been to the fore, and the situation has not changed. In particular, there is a tendency among critics, for example of empire, to write in terms of undifferentiated blocs of supposed alignment, to move freely back and forth across the centuries, and readily to ascribe causes in a somewhat reductionist fashion...

Tomorrow: an excerpt from "Dueling Faiths: Science and Religion under the Great Reset" by Richard Fernandez.

Our Black Marxist Murder Spree

Only rarely do present circumstances so align themselves as to reveal the future with clarity. We are in such a period right now, and to those willing to open their eyes to it, the future staring back at them is bleak indeed.

I worked as a police officer in Los Angeles for more than 30 years, and people of my generation may recall with dread the crime wave of the late ‘80s and early '90s, when Los Angeles saw an average of three times the number of murders as have occurred in recent years. In 1992, the Los Angeles Police Department handled 1,092 homicides. Compare this figure with 2020’s total of 349 and you get an idea of how much safer the city became in 28 years, thanks largely to the efforts of the men and women of the LAPD. But even the 349 figure was a significant increase from 2019, when 253 people were killed in L.A. Will we soon look on 2020 as the good old days? All available evidence says yes.

I’ve been writing about the coming crime wave since 2014, when Michael Brown’s death in a Ferguson, Mo., police shooting gave rise to the widely circulated lie – still believed in some quarters – that he had been killed while trying to surrender. Brown’s death and the rioting the followed led to what Heather Mac Donald described as the Ferguson Effect, in which police officers shrink from proactive crime-fighting measures for fear of becoming involved in a controversial incident. The Ferguson Effect lives on, more destructively than ever.

Ferguson, Mo., 2014.

This fact is welcomed, even celebrated, by the Black Lives Matter organization and their myriad acolytes. BLM, formed in 2013 after the death of Trayvon Martin, became the leading voice in opposition to what had been the traditional responses to crime, i.e., arrests, prosecutions, and incarceration.

BLM’s influence has only grown in the years since, most especially after last year’s death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police officers, and today it is the puppet master of the far left. The news media, academia, and the entertainment industry unquestioningly, even gleefully parrot its calumnies, most prominent among which is the claim that the American criminal justice system is irredeemably racist and must be torn out root and branch in order to achieve some utopian vision of “social justice.”

It is important to note that the appending of any modifier to the word “justice” inverts, even perverts, its very meaning, and in no arena has actual justice been more perverted than in “social justice,” which at it core subordinates the interests of crime victims and the law-abiding to those of the criminals who prey upon them, revealing the enduring truth in the Old Testament wisdom that those who are kind to the cruel will be cruel to the kind. How else to explain the unhinged reaction among American elites to the April 21 police shooting of Ma’Khia Bryant in Columbus, Ohio?

Police body camera footage clearly showed Bryant, 16, was armed with a knife and in the very act of trying to stab a girl at the time she was shot. Of course we are saddened by the sight of someone being killed, most especially someone so young, but how depraved must one be to sympathize more with Bryant than with the girl she was attacking? Yet we heard voices from across the American left, from politicians to media figures to professional athletes, denouncing the officer and calling for his arrest. Had that officer not arrived and acted when and as he did, the city of Columbus and the country overall most likely would have recorded another instance of a young black person dying at the hands of another, the type of incident that happens thousands of times every year yet results in no protests, no outrage, and no indignant commentary in the newspapers or on television.

The silence among our elites to this carnage is deafening. Last year brought an alarming rise in homicides across the country, with killings up by an average of 37 percent in America’s 57 largest cities. Some cities were hit harder than others: in New York City the increase was 39 percent, in Chicago it was 55 percent, and in Milwaukee murders nearly doubled over the previous year. All told, there were 7,101 homicides in these 57 cities, the great majority of whose victims were blacks or Latinos who fell to killers of their own ethnicity.

The Washington Post reports 1,021 people in the United States were shot and killed by the police in 2020, and even if one accepts the phantasmagoric proposition that not a single one of these killings was justified, one is still left with problems so different in scale as to question the motives of those who focus on the smaller number and not the larger.

And yet that is what Black Lives Matter and their cult of followers do. Certainly an injustice was done to George Floyd, whose death has been addressed to the extent the legal system is able, but is his death more lamentable than those of the 81 other people murdered in Minneapolis last year? What of the 261 victims in St. Louis, the 437 in New York, and the 769 in Chicago? Were their lives so meanly regarded as to be insignificant to those who lecture their fellow citizens on the value of black lives?

They will not answer this question, and they will impugn the motives of anyone who dares put it forward, for to question them is obstruct the revolution they make no secret of advocating. BLM is merely the latest iteration of Marxist radicals to win the adulation of our political, academic, and media elites, the latest band of misfits to wield “Critical Theory” as a hammer and chisel (hammer and sickle?) against the pillars of Western civilization, among the foundational of which is the rule of law.

Chronicle of deaths foretold.

In his 2017 book The Devil’s Pleasure Palace, my friend Michael Walsh tells of the grim harvest brought by these purveyors of Critical Theory. “Look about your daily lives here in early twenty-first-century America and Western Europe,” he writes, “and see the shabbiness, hear the coarseness of speech and dialogue, witness the lowered standards not only of personal behavior but also of cultural norms, savor the shrunken horizons of the future.”

As it has in the past, America will one day repudiate the visions espoused by the neo-Marxists, but until it does, how many murdered corpses will litter our shrunken horizons?

If the Police Won't Defend You, Defend Yourself

There is a natural tendency in some people to search for the silver lining in every cloud, no matter how ominous that cloud may appear. Americans, it seems to me, are especially prone to this brand of sunny optimism, though perhaps not to the degree of past generations.

So it’s unsurprising that many of President Trump’s supporters, in assessing the odds against his success in challenging the election results, would be casting about in search of an upside to a Biden win should it come to pass. “Well,” such a person might say, “at least all those leftist mobs will be appeased now. At least we won’t have to deal with them anymore.” Alas . . .

And yours does not.

The Los Angeles Times reported on Monday that anarchists in the capital of the movement, Portland, Oregon, have declared they have no intention of standing down, even with Biden’s apparent election. “F— Joe Biden!” a group of them chanted on the night of Nov. 8 as they set out on a march to the office of the Multnomah Democrats, which they proceeded to vandalize.

A photograph accompanying the story shows the mob evincing no worry of police response or of any potential consequences for their actions. (Remarkably, they stopped short of setting the building on fire, which the optimists among us may see as a hopeful sign. My prediction is that the building is torched before the year is out.)

Another photograph accompanying the story is more chilling. Anarchists are shown holding a banner which reads, “WE DON’T WANT BIDEN—WE WANT REVENGE!” with the lettering done in black with the exception of the word “REVENGE,” which is printed in blood red. Below the lettering are examples of Antifa symbology, including an AK-47 rifle, the Soviet Union's weapon of choice for Marxist revolutionaries around the world.

Well, some might say, that’s just Portland, which everyone knows is a wacky town. True enough, but look at what happened in Washington, D.C., on Saturday. Many thousands of Trump supporters gathered and marched to encourage the president and express their skepticism of the officially announced election returns. Whatever one may think about these opinions, it is indisputable that these people had the right to peaceably assemble and express themselves in this fashion, regardless of how that expression may run counter to that of our political and media elites.

And it must be noted that the march was not just “mostly peaceful,” as those same political and media elites describe so many leftist protests that result in looting, vandalism, and arson. It was entirely peaceful, that is until the marchers were set upon by roving bands of BLM and Antifa thugs who, like packs of hyenas, attacked unfortunate Trump supporters who had straggled from the safety of the larger group, stealing their hats, flags, and in some cases committing felony assaults against them.

Can you hear the people sing?

As is their wont, mainstream media outlets called these incidents “clashes” between opposing groups, as though there were some doubt as to which side instigated the violence. Typical was CNN, whose report begins thus: “Anti-Trump protesters clashed with supporters of the President and law enforcement Saturday evening in the nation’s capital as they tried to make their way to a hotel where Trump supporters were staying.”

One can well imagine how CNN and their ilk would report matters if there had been even the slightest evidence that Trump loyalists had been the aggressors in these “clashes.” Indeed, though CNN was meticulous in naming the Proud Boys and the Three Percenters among the Trump supporters, implying without actually stating that these groups were the source of the troubles, nowhere in their report will you find any reference to Antifa or Black Lives Matter.

This is the type of willful blindness that arouses suspicion and contempt of the mainstream media among conservatives, even those who under ordinary circumstances would be disdainful of groups like the Proud Boys but nonetheless would stand with them if forced to choose between them and the Marxist attack squads seen terrorizing senior citizens, women, and children on Saturday.

All of which raises the question: Now what? Will the 73 million Americans who voted for Trump, even those who never considered attending a rally or sporting a MAGA hat, will they allow themselves to be abused in public by these self-appointed monitors of public discourse? If we assume Joe Biden is sworn in as president on January 20, dare we also assume he will make any effort to tame these violent fringes of the far left?

How many more times will we see people accosted on restaurant patios and bullied into repeating some favored phrase or raising a fist in feigned solidarity with those who would upend the tables (or worse) if the diners fail to comply? There is little in Biden’s lengthy career to suggest he would so much as utter a mild condemnation of these tactics, much less lift a finger to stop them. Never a man of any discernible principles or convictions, Biden has become even more of a political windsock in his old age, and within his party the wind is blowing hard leftward.

Outside his party, not so much. But sadly those 73 million Trump voters are coming to realize that America’s police, at least those in major cities, are being rendered powerless to stand in the way of this thuggery. Our large cities are governed by people whose sympathies are aligned with those of the thugs, and cops are finding that even when they are allowed to make arrests in cases of political violence, the perpetrators are released without bail and prosecutors decline to file charges. Unsurprisingly, police officers are asking themselves, “Why bother?”

BLM down: is turnabout fair play?

With the collapse of these traditional safeguards, Americans find themselves increasingly on their own in matters of self-defense. Fortunately, at least until the leftists can devise a way around it, the Second Amendment still stands.

I don’t intend anyone to take this as an endorsement of vigilantism or of disproportionate response to being hectored on the street, but we have seen, most recently in Washington, D.C., but also in many other cities during these months of protests, incidents in which innocent people have been knocked unconscious, menaced with weapons, or forced to flee for their lives under a hail of potentially deadly fireworks and other explosives.

Any American has the right to use reasonable force to defend himself against such attacks. It’s time we saw more of them do so.