In your comment on WJT's "Not with a bang" post, you write: "This is an overweight, sweaty Brezhnev revolution; not Lenin and Trotsky style of 'cool' evil." Brezhnev's USSR... Hmm. That got me thinking. WJT in turn is responding to William Wildblood's post, where WW writes: "We are living in times which are both extraordinary and just plain dull. Nothing of any real interest is taking place even though recent events have been both dramatic and unprecedented." Round and round the web we go! WW identifies an aspect of the disjointed times we're living through, their fusion of frantic panics (e.g., the WuFlu Panic) with depressing banality (e.g., popular [anti-]culture, and politics) that suppresses most people's instinct to resist. Maybe we deserve this as a society or post-civilisation; we've drained our age of the sacred. As Solzhenitsyn heard from his elders about the great disasters that had befallen Russia in his childhood, "Men have forgotten God; that's why all this has happened." Ours does make for a dull, seedy, and most mundane apocalypse. Less bloody than what those elders spoke of, but no less real. Back to Brezhnev: The Soviet Union he presided over - 1964-1982 - was pretty grey when Brezhnev reached the top after ousting Khrushchev (who wasn't dull; must give Nikita Sergeievich that), and even more grey by the time Leonid Ilyich died. It was an overweight, sweaty successor to a failed revolution: "We pretend to work, the Party pretends to pay us." Brezhnev was succeeded by Yuri Vladimirovich Andropov; apparatchik administrator replaced by sinister secret policeman. Andropov wasn't a cool, leather-coated Chekist of Lenin/Trotsky revolutionary enthusiasms; he was a dead-eyed defender of the stagnant Soviet status quo. Fortunately for all, by the time he ensconced himself in the Kremlin Andropov could do little more than die slowly of age and ailments. The shoot-down of KAL 007 on Andropov's watch does gives a flavour of how he preferred to solve problems, however. There is an end-times feeling in the air in 2020. As you note, things are coming to a point, and a grey Leftist conformism, with a dull, seedy Brezhnev feeling about it, is imposed by means short (usually) of physical state coercion. But I think this iteration of globalist/materialist control is not the terminal stage of our post-civilisation. We may be in a Brezhnev stage, but we have an Andropov stage yet to endure, one in which whoever stands in for Andropov in my analogy will hold power long enough to make many more miserable. Things will come to a sharper point still. Imagine something like the WEF's Global Reset (thank you, Francis Berger, for warning us all about that), enforced against Western people with the full coercive powers of national governments and international organisations such as the UN and EU. At least at first, co-opted churches will acquiesce. The evil will be just as mundane and dull, but it will be even harder to avoid and more violently enforced. It won't just be doxing and social cancellation. Ultimately, failure is inevitable, but things will get worse for the remnant before post-civilisation collapses of its own hollowness and contradictions. What follows that collapse will be up to God, and those who stick it out. And as the Old Bolsheviks found out, the real powers behind these evils will break their tools before they're done.
a_probst: If the “Andropov phase” is dire enough, maybe we’ll be able to proceed to some restoration without a Gorby phase. Let’s hope we don’t have to endure a Yeltsin phase as we emerge from under the rubble! And, no, that’s not asking for a Putin phase, although I don’t particularly mind Bad Vlad, unlike all those aggrieved US/UK neocons and liberals who make such a hate-fetish of post-Soviet Russia.
A brief further word on this striking phenomenon from WmJas Tychonievich*.
I had not been prepared for just how stupid the apocalypse would be, how obscene, how inane.
Nothing so romantic as an Armageddon, no grand Last Battle, no stern Götterdämmerung. No, the earthy expression turns out to have been nearest the truth all along: when the shit hits the fan.
And how interesting is that?
Note: My impression is that people are 'keeping cheerful' by resolutely Not-thinking; all are hope-less.
...What, after all, is there to hope for? (Materially-speaking - and that, apparently, is everything.)
Fearful of what is happening, and especially of what may happen (with full official-media support) - but nobody is excited.
Resistance is too little, too late; subversion doesn't work, because of the docility, gullibility and empty-headedness of the mass population; counter-revolution ruled-out by the lack of any substantive support.
Because we (as a civilization) are getting just precisely what we ask for: a God-less world in its fullest implications - which means There Is No Alternative to ever-fuller assimilation into the nothingness that is The Borg/ The System/ The Matrix...
No alternative but death - which to Modern Man is just another kind of Nothing.
*Wm's title echoes the close of TS Eliot's Hollow Men poem - which seems ever more precient:
This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends Not with a bang but with a whimper.
"This dullest, seediest, most mundane of apocalypses/ revolutions"
5 Comments -
In your comment on WJT's "Not with a bang" post, you write:
"This is an overweight, sweaty Brezhnev revolution; not Lenin and Trotsky style of 'cool' evil." Brezhnev's USSR... Hmm. That got me thinking.
WJT in turn is responding to William Wildblood's post, where WW writes:
"We are living in times which are both extraordinary and just plain dull. Nothing of any real interest is taking place even though recent events have been both dramatic and unprecedented."
Round and round the web we go!
WW identifies an aspect of the disjointed times we're living through, their fusion of frantic panics (e.g., the WuFlu Panic) with depressing banality (e.g., popular [anti-]culture, and politics) that suppresses most people's instinct to resist. Maybe we deserve this as a society or post-civilisation; we've drained our age of the sacred. As Solzhenitsyn heard from his elders about the great disasters that had befallen Russia in his childhood, "Men have forgotten God; that's why all this has happened." Ours does make for a dull, seedy, and most mundane apocalypse. Less bloody than what those elders spoke of, but no less real.
Back to Brezhnev: The Soviet Union he presided over - 1964-1982 - was pretty grey when Brezhnev reached the top after ousting Khrushchev (who wasn't dull; must give Nikita Sergeievich that), and even more grey by the time Leonid Ilyich died. It was an overweight, sweaty successor to a failed revolution: "We pretend to work, the Party pretends to pay us."
Brezhnev was succeeded by Yuri Vladimirovich Andropov; apparatchik administrator replaced by sinister secret policeman. Andropov wasn't a cool, leather-coated Chekist of Lenin/Trotsky revolutionary enthusiasms; he was a dead-eyed defender of the stagnant Soviet status quo. Fortunately for all, by the time he ensconced himself in the Kremlin Andropov could do little more than die slowly of age and ailments. The shoot-down of KAL 007 on Andropov's watch does gives a flavour of how he preferred to solve problems, however.
There is an end-times feeling in the air in 2020. As you note, things are coming to a point, and a grey Leftist conformism, with a dull, seedy Brezhnev feeling about it, is imposed by means short (usually) of physical state coercion. But I think this iteration of globalist/materialist control is not the terminal stage of our post-civilisation.
We may be in a Brezhnev stage, but we have an Andropov stage yet to endure, one in which whoever stands in for Andropov in my analogy will hold power long enough to make many more miserable.
Things will come to a sharper point still. Imagine something like the WEF's Global Reset (thank you, Francis Berger, for warning us all about that), enforced against Western people with the full coercive powers of national governments and international organisations such as the UN and EU. At least at first, co-opted churches will acquiesce. The evil will be just as mundane and dull, but it will be even harder to avoid and more violently enforced. It won't just be doxing and social cancellation.
Ultimately, failure is inevitable, but things will get worse for the remnant before post-civilisation collapses of its own hollowness and contradictions. What follows that collapse will be up to God, and those who stick it out. And as the Old Bolsheviks found out, the real powers behind these evils will break their tools before they're done.
28 August 2020 at 21:53
@Howard Ramsey Sutherland
We're not going to get a Gorbachev, are we?
30 August 2020 at 01:51
a_probst: If the “Andropov phase” is dire enough, maybe we’ll be able to proceed to some restoration without a Gorby phase. Let’s hope we don’t have to endure a Yeltsin phase as we emerge from under the rubble!
And, no, that’s not asking for a Putin phase, although I don’t particularly mind Bad Vlad, unlike all those aggrieved US/UK neocons and liberals who make such a hate-fetish of post-Soviet Russia.
30 August 2020 at 15:49
History Never repeats itself, and especially not nowadays!
30 August 2020 at 16:37
True! But, as somebody once said, it may rhyme.
30 August 2020 at 18:58