Kindle Notes & Highlights
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September 26 - September 26, 2017
the parallel with Gnostic thought is meaningful because it lets us dispose of the interpretations that were so common just a few years ago and viewed Marxism as a Christian heresy or as a form of anonymous Christianity, and thus as a schism to be healed.
“class political consciousness can be brought to the workers only from without”10
the Communist revolution could succeed only by encountering the Russian populist tradition.
Marxism realizes itself historically by continuing and increasing Tsarist imperialism, by fully empowering precisely the danger Marx had most feared.
In Nazism everything develops as if the criterion of truth were to replace each Communist category with its exact opposite, but still within the same materialistic perspective of Marxism. Thus, class is replaced by race, the bourgeois by the Jew. Hence, history is interpreted as a death struggle between the Aryan and the Jew, which has now reached the decisive stage when evil will be defeated or will triumph. It is not by chance that the anti-Semitic passages of Mein Kampf take a universalistic missionary tone – the same idea as the universal mission of the proletarian revolution – and that
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extreme materialism and scientism eliminate dialectics.
Rousseau being the father of egalitarian ideas and thus of contemporary democracy and socialism, and Nietzsche the father of irrationalism.
the rejection of the dependence on God the Creator goes hand in hand with an extreme interpretation of the aspect of religion as liberation and redemption. The Marxist revolution keeps the appearance of a religion because it requires a conversion, since it marks a transition to a higher reality and to a reality that is totally “other,” even if absolutely not transcendent or supernatural.
Marxism could become reality only in the exact way it did; therefore, it was verified in terms of its power, and at the same time refuted in terms of its outcome.
Undoubtedly, it may seem peculiar that the class that in history has been given the task of bringing about universal redemption is unable to fulfill this mission unless directed by a culture coming from outside and, moreover, from intellectuals belonging to the very class it was supposed to overthrow. In truth, it seems to me that in the history of Marxism an exhaustive answer was never given to the problem of the “exceptions,” of why some bourgeois are able to evade the false consciousness that enslaves them because of their class.
the originally religious thesis of Russian supremacy for the sake of world redemption, forsaken by Tsarism, was taken over by revolutionary Communism.
it is true that Western countries are not Communist, but it is not true that Marxism has not affected the culture and customs of their peoples.
Modern science, whose great contributions to its own field obviously nobody can deny, started in the 1600s when the search for “vertical causality” (from physics to metaphysics) was replaced by the one for “horizontal causality,” in the sense of searching for laws that express constant relationships between phenomena.
the most barbaric form of thought that ever appeared, so-called analytical philosophy).
Lolol
a new, more dangerous, and more radical form of totalitarianism, even though these new positions claim to represent the highest degree of democracy and anti-Fascism.
the new totalitarianism is a totalitarianism of “disintegration,” because the complete negation of tradition coincides with the negation of all “fatherlands.” As a result, large corporations and political parties take the semblance of fiefdoms,10 and only foreign powers can play the role of mediators between them.
the current ethical-political situation originated from an “internal crisis of anti-Fascism.” We must have the courage to say it: today we need to criticize a certain version of anti-Fascism for the sake of “faithfulness to anti-Fascism.”
what idea of culture led people to generalize the idea of Fascism to the point of including any movement that was either authoritarian or generically inclined to defend the past
according to an expression that used to be dear to Marxist scholars and has now been adopted by people on the Catholic left, who are late as usual).
Fascism is a sin against the progressive movement of history.
the equation traditionalism-equals-Fascism (at least potentially) and progressivism-equals-anti-Fascism is nonsense.
Against the common thesis that the revolutionary dynamics of the Resistance was stopped by conservatism, I claim instead that the renewal or re-form that are intrinsic to tradition (Karl Barth: “renewal does not mean revolution, nor does it mean restoration, but rather ‘re-formation’”24) have been blocked by the progressive mentality’s choice for conservatism (first of all as cultural conservatism), and by the consequent failure to criticize the idea of revolution.
traditionalism and Fascism cannot be confused, because traditionalism must necessarily go back to Plato (it is impossible to speak of “tradition” without making reference to the thesis that “truth in itself” and “good in itself” are absolute, eternal, etc.), whereas Mussolini and Hitler come “after” Nietzsche and his destruction of the idea of truth.
It rediscovers freedom “from” (in practice, freedom from the burden of all moral obligations), separating it completely from freedom “for.”
In the Western world we have reached a “democracy devoid of the sacred.” Some will reply, resorting to a standard rhetorical device, that this is precisely the progress. This kind of democracy marks the transition to an “open society,” which accepts and respects all forms of thought and enables religion to become purer by separating politics from religion, and so on. In actuality, this democracy “devoid of the sacred” coincides with absolute atheism.
“The essence of Communism is defined here in terms of the mutual immanence and functional inter-dependence of three factors: an ‘empire’ (which pretends to be something else than an empire), a ‘secular religion’ (which pretends to be something else than a secular religion) and a ‘subversive organization of world-conquerors’ (which pretends to be something else than a subversive organization of world-conquerors).”39
The Stalinist system was based on absolute mendacity. The Nazi system was based on absolute sincerity.
Stalinism declared that the USSR was the freest and happiest country on earth, the land where “true” democracy flourished and beautiful justice was finally realized… millions of men died believing its lies… martyrs of a system and a tyrant who had devoted himself to one of the most prodigious “inversions of ideals” in history. Nazism, another monster, presented itself naked. It affirmed its cruelty, its hatred and its uncompromising and murderous racism. It proclaimed its lust for genocide… it shouted out its will to enslave. Two terrifying faces. One masked, the other naked.40
Where woman is submitted to man, intelligence and strength triumph; where man to woman, imagination and violence.
Order was reduced to the pure exercise of power and separated from any authority of values;
the large fraction of Catholic theologians who have accepted the progressive myth. The language they use is always the same: they appeal to the ideals of the Gospel against the Roman order.
it is unquestionably true that Russia constitutes the last bastion of the sacral mindset in the field of politics.
Is this why the Orthodox Church has been affected the least (or not at all) by the new Modernism, the theology of secularization and of the death of God has impacted it very little, and Russian theology schools are the most traditional and also (I have heard) the most rigorous in their teaching?
This is the reason why, so far, Russia has been left essentially unscathed by the process of self-destruction that is affecting, without exception, the European countries and even the United States, although in a different form.
the last old-fashioned pope, Pius XII, the “Vicar.”
“even if society in the United States calls itself Christian, American philosophy is essentially all atheistic. Not only that: it is marked by the idolatry of science, the tool that will radically change humanity by producing technical development, and will bring to mankind all the happiness that man by his ‘nature’ can desire.”
Saint-Simonism is the origin of sociology, of the secular version of Americanism, of the rehabilitation of the flesh, and of the progressive “new Christianity”).
what is the single theme of the various new theologies of demythologization, secularization, the death of God, and so on, in the simplest possible terms? It is the following: that the modern age is marked by the transition from the vertical to the horizontal dimension.
Not only is the individual reduced to a social atom, but this atom is also fragmented.
the Americanization of Europe would lead to the Americanization of the whole world.22
I would rather not use the expression “American imperialism.” I would speak, instead, of a universalistic awareness of their mission that Europeans lent to Americans as they waged the Enlightenment’s war against their own past. It is a fact that today America is the wellspring of the principle of disintegration, but the poisoning of America has largely been the work of Europeans.
Colonization can be achieved by only one method: by uprooting a people from its traditions.
there is definitely more female than male irreligiosity among the young.
by now the machinery of Western irreligion moves forward by inertia.
Could it happen that the Vatican – and I am speaking of the component most faithful to traditional orthodoxy – will start looking at Russia, having lost all hope in the West?
Europe cannot escape decadence except by radically rejecting what could be called the “Occidentalist heresy.”
at our time in history heresies and utopias have all come together giving science the task of legitimizing them.
the typical confusion of the Frankfurt School, which views Platonic purification and the modern idea of scientific-technical domination of nature as stages of the same process.
a rebellion against both the technocratic society and the traditional spirit (i.e., against two opposites, which were conflated without mediation), ending in the renewed libertinism of permissive licentiousness as the unavoidable outcome.13
permissivism represents the most complete negation of liberalism, even though it must call itself liberal.
