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July 20, 2023

As the world watched the Wagner mercenaries make good on their mutinous threats and advance on Moscow last month, Vladimir Putin shot them down in a television address. Spitting with rage and refusing to utter Prigozhins name, he said that the leaders of the rebellion had betrayed their country, their people. Amid his invective of treachery and treason, Putin levelled another charge: apostasy.

Theres no more defining act of the latter years of Putins reign than the invasion of Ukraine, where the Russian leaders justification for the war has been as moral as it is material. In Putins address to the nation on the eve of the invasion last year, he spoke of needing to protect Russia from dangerous Western influences which were seeking to destroy our traditional values, and force on us their false values that would erode us, our people, from within. As with his charge against Prigozhin, it was a pointed signal to people both inside and outside of Russia that, to him, this was an issue far greater than mere borders. And this invocation of cosmic transgressions speaks to a deeper change happening within Russia, a tightening of the bond between the political and the spiritual.

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In spiritual terms, the merger of Orthodox Church and Russian state began long before Prigozhin launched his ill-fated mission. Its a process that was memorialised in 2020, when the Cathedral of the Armed Forces of Russia opened in Moscow to commemorate the 75th anniversary of Soviet victory over Nazi Germany on the Eastern Front. The stained-glass mosaics on the imposing building fuse saints and military heroism, while its floors are made of melted-down trophies seized from the Nazis; every time a Russian walks on them, he is symbolically delivering a blow to the fascist enemy. The proportions of the church are deliberately encrypted with numerology: the height of 14.18 metres, for instance, corresponds to the 1,418 days of what Russians call the Great Patriotic War. It is, as Aris Roussinos described it, a statement of Russias neo-traditionalist state ideology for the next century.

A wartime leader calling on higher powers to fortify a nation is hardly new, but Putins regime appears to be increasingly leaning into the mystical as a source of its legitimacy. Last autumn, the bones of legendary commander Grigory Potemkin Catherine the Greats consort were returned to Russia from the fiercely contested Ukrainian city of Kherson. The remains of Prince Alexander Nevsky, the great warrior-saint of medieval Rus, have also been handed over from the St Petersburgs Hermitage Museum to the Orthodox Church. Then, in May this year, the icon of Saint Seraphim of Sarov, a widely venerated 18th-century hermit and confessor, was flown over parts of Russia susceptible to Ukrainian advances, in an apparent bid to ward off potential drone attacks. Putins message to the nation would seem to be that its traditions are its strength.

This is a country that is not yet fully mobilised, but firmly on a war footing, and one where people have been told that they must endure and suffer for the good of the motherland. The message is increasingly clear: Russia is not simply engaged in a physical battle, but a celestial one.

It was around 10 years ago that Putin began drawing heavily on Russias religious heritage for geopolitical reasons. This is, perhaps not coincidentally, around the time that Putin started tinkering with his borders in Crimea. He was trying to position Russia as this geopolitical democracy thats different from Europe and the West because [of its] religious values, explains Telly Papanikolaou, professor of theology.

The Russian Orthodox Church has backed itself into becoming nothing more than a department of the foreign ministry, he says, adding that the church is being used as a soft-power tool of the regime. And Putin has squarely aimed his rhetoric at those in the West who believe that traditional values are under threat from abortion, gay marriage and womens rights. But in labelling the mutiny as apostasy, Papanikolaou believes that Putin is looking inside rather than beyond his borders, attempting to weaponise religious heritage to eradicate dissenters.

When it comes to using the Russian Orthodox faith as a political tool, the state has a deeply fraught history. The church was central to Russian life before the Bolshevik revolution, before the Soviet state attempted to completely decouple Christianity from Russian identity. But it was impossible to unwind such a rich history. Earlier this year, declassified Swiss documents revealed that Patriarch Kirill, who has headed the Orthodox Church since 2009, worked for the KGB in the Seventies, suggesting a closer bond between church and state than is generally recognised in histories of the Cold War. And as the collapse of communism saw chaos reign, many Russians returned to religion.

During those years, however, the Orthodox Church faced serious competition for the first time. Western missionaries labelled by the then-Patriarch as spiritual colonisers had long been obsessed with reaching the godless communists. As a result, some groups, such as Jehovahs Witnesses, were persecuted by the state before being banned entirely.

The spiritual remit of the Putin era favoured the Orthodox faith, but was careful not to alienate the broad collection of religions in the Russian Federation, co-opting the Islam of the Caucasus as well as Judaism and Buddhism. Religious leaders all got the same message: domesticate your boys and be a part of the state apparatus, and youll be fine. Crack down on the gays and western decadence, and you, too, can be a patriotic Russian. Today, that extends to the war effort, which is a highly national project.

In fact, according to a paper published by Kristina Stoeckl last year, the concept of spiritual security has become Kremlin doctrine. It all began in the year 2000 shortly after Putin came to power around the same time that the European Unions Charter of Fundamental Human Rights enshrined right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion.

Spiritual security became a rival to the security offered by Nato and the EU, and in time, Stoeckl says, has become the justification for Russias war on Ukraine and, in an enlarged perspective, with the West. The amendment of the Russian constitution in 2020, Stoeckl notes, saw it launch a Declaration of Values, in which spiritual ideals were emphasised, in speeches by academics as well as religious figures. In the 2021 update to the document, the word spiritual was mentioned 24 times. Stoeckl believes that this is all part of giving the FSB, successor to the KGB, a moral mission.

The marriage of church and secret service was consummated in 2002, when an Orthodox Church was consecrated within the infamous Lubankya headquarters of the FSB by none other than Nikolai Patrushev, Putins attack dog who still heads the Russian Security Council and is reportedly positioning his son as a potential future leader of the country. At this point, Stoeckl says, church leadership and the government agreed that, among the tasks of the FSB, police and law enforcement, was the safeguarding of Russian identity and culture against undesirable influences. Spiritual values are discussed in terms of friends and enemies, with Russia defined always in relation to a West and a West that Putin feels is forever closing in.

At the same time, Russia is pushing issues that appeal to religious conservatives in the West most successfully with its emphasis on what are euphemistically known as traditional family values. That Russia remains the world leader in abortions per capita by some distance is an inconvenient truth. The Levada Center, considered Russias most reliable pollsters even in repressive times, recently found thatthe number of Russians who do not support homosexual relationships has grown significantly, from 60% in 2013 to 69% in 2021. Meanwhile, next year, Russian state hospitals will open clinics for LGBT conversion therapy a deeply held belief of the Putin regime.

The mirror image of this is playing out in Ukraine. Not exactly the natural home of LGBT allyship, Kyiv last month drafted a new civil union law that would give same-sex partnerships legal status for the first time. That Ukraine is increasingly becoming more accepting might be a political move to curry favour with the West, since those Ukrainians who might be most opposed to it are, in large part, currently occupied on the frontlines. For the Russian Orthodox Church, it is further confirmation since the Ukrainian Orthodox Church decided to break away in 2019 of the spiritual cleavage between the two nations.

There are now two distinct battlefronts: the horrific conflict raging beyond the Dnipro, and a culture war that has Russians making gains far beyond Bakhmut. Its a new East-West divide, Telly Papanikolaou says, a fight that has replaced the Cold War dichotomy of communism versus democracy. To the Russian state, and the Russian church, it is a question of supporting religion and traditional values against a godless, liberal, aggressively atheist West.

It would be simple to conclude that, in bringing back faith-based politics, Putin is dictating his peoples values. But the truth is not so straightforward. Because, as in the chaotic years after the end of the Cold War, Russians do seem to be turning to God of their own volition. A few years ago, a report from the Russian Academy of Sciences found there are around 800,000 faith healers in the country compared to 640,000 medical doctors. Two-thirds of women, and one-quarter of men, said that they had sought help from a psychic or a sorcerer at some point in their life.

Turning to God when the state fails is something that can be seen in Russias fellow BRIC economies, Brazil and South Africa. Emerging from similarly repressive regimes, a military dictatorship and apartheid respectively, their people rapidly took up Pentecostal Christianity, similarly doubling down on family values. For the millions who feel let down by the false promises of the new state, faith seems the only alternative. In Brazil, one study found that a downturn in the GDP had a direct correlation to increased church attendance.

Its difficult to know the true thoughts of the Russian people, but there is strong evidence that Russians are losing faith in the states narrative and, equally, that the Putin regime is increasingly courting religion for its legitimacy. One survey found that, in the six months following the invasion of Ukraine last year, Russians watching state television fell from 86% to 65%. Russians appear to be losing faith in the special military operation, too.

Putin had a front row seat for the collapse of communism in East Germany; he knows all too well that when people stop believing in the system, it can be catastrophic. He also seems aware that Russians are looking to religion rather than nationalism for their moral nourishment. For now, it appears that the regime is robust enough to meet the Russian people where they are, spiritually. As Kremlin rhetoric increasingly turns to asking for suffering and sacrifice for the greater good deeply religious notions, as much as they are national ones those daring to challenge it will either be seen as saintly figures, or very stupid ones.

See the original post here:
Putin's holy war on Ukraine - UnHerd

Campaign slogans are subject to pillory and parody - but a good one can lift the hopes of the politicians pushing them. Who comes up with them? And how?

Photo: Supplied /Labour Party

It's got to have "zizz, zazz, zing, zook" and a "wow".

"It's a little bit like poetry," ad man Mike "Hutch" Hutcheson tells The Detail, as he describes a slogan.

"It should be a short verse or a short statement that captures the zeitgeist of something or someone or a time.

"Good slogans are founded in truth ... something fatuous that doesn't ring true to people just makes them laugh it's an eye roll. What you want is something that moves the hearts of men."

The Detail also talks to Sir Bob Harveysurfer, former Waitkere mayor and top ad-man, and the self-proclaimed political slogan king of New Zealand.

He was part of the group who brought slogans into the political game in New Zealand during Labour Party campaigns in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

He got the idea from briefly working at an advertising agency in New York, which was pitching to advertise Richard Nixon's campaign in 1968.

"They were emphasising how audiences could be inspired by music, slogans slogans were forbidden, of course, in New Zealand then," Harvey says.

"Nothing was happening in New Zealand all the political ads said "vote Labour, vote Social Credit, vote communism"which was very much a viable alternative! They had obviously a big photograph of one of the candidates pretty bloody dull and boring stuff."

When Norman Kirk arrived on the scene, Bob Harvey got the job of promoting the Labour Party.

He was the mastermind behind the 1969 slogan "Make Things Happen"and the 1972 slogan "It's Time".

He came up with the "Make Things Happen" slogan on a run but it didn't win Kirk the job of prime minister. However, the 1972 campaign tagline did.

"It came from a meeting I was at, with a guy called Arthur Faulkner ... and he was giving a talk, I think somewhere in Mt Roskill, and I was sitting here and he said "it's really time, it's time for a change.

"I thought, 'that's a good line', so I wrote down on a piece of paper 'it's time for change'. Then I did some bumper stickers and showed Norman."

Harvey says Kirk thought 'it's time for change'was too "extreme", so the phrase was snipped down to "It's Time".

Harvey has worked on winning campaigns for the likes of Tim Shadbolt in Waitemat and Mike Moore in Mt Eden. But when he ran for mayor himself, he couldn't come up with a tagline.

"I found it really difficult to come up with a slogan for myself ...I just simply went with 'Harvey for Waitkere'."

To test out the slogans beforehand, he would work with Auckland University lecturers and students and "you'd get a reaction very quickly" to figure out if it was good.

But is a slogan really all that important?

"There [have been] some great slogans over the years but you don't have to have one, you're better to have a really good story and a story that tells the truth. I think we're far too preoccupied with the witty, pithy statement," Hutcheson says.

He talks about Len Brown,the first mayor of the Auckland Super Citya campaign he worked on.

"We did the research and found that the real problem facing Aucklanders was transport. So we said to Len, 'you've really got to get on television and talk about transport ... I can't even remember what the slogan was because that wasn't the story.The story was he talked about transport and solving Auckland's transport woes."

Listen to the full episode for Sir Bob Harvey's tales of success and failure as the 'slogan' is born in New Zealand.

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Original post:
The zing zazz factor in a slogan - RNZ

By Deacon Matthew Hecker, Ph.D.

You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with your entire mind, and with all your strength. The second is this: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. There is no other commandment greater than these. Mark 12:30-31.

A Lincoln man dedicated to the Sacred Heart of Jesus knows what it means to love ones neighbor.

He was once the neighbor most in need of love, and he has made it his lifes purpose to return and to share that love.

Chuyen (pronounced like Schwinn but without the s) Tran was the fourth of nine children in his family, born in South Vietnam in 1965, in the middle of a terrible civil war. The son of a high-ranking military officer, he was never far from the reaches of war. Those old enough to remember will recall it a bloody political conflict between the forces of Communism (North Vietnam) and Democracy (South Vietnam).

America officially entered the conflict in the early 1960s, siding with South Vietnam.

Trans father grew up in North Vietnam. When the Communists arrived, he was forced to flee south on very short notice. Other than the clothes on his back, he took with him one item: a statue of the Sacred Heart of Jesus.

My grandparents and parents made sure Catholicism was the rock on which our family is built, Tran said.

Tran grew up in rural South Vietnam, in a town similar in size he said, to Auburn. However, when he was 10 years old, every aspect of his life turned upside down. In 1975, the United States withdrew from the Vietnam War, leading to the collapse of South Vietnam. Because of his fathers military rank and position, the family faced imprisonment or execution.

On April 30, 1975, Trans father came home and informed the family they had to leave and would never be returning. There were 26 people in the extended Tran family and one of them, his grandfather, was disabled.

Tran remembers asking his dad: Where are we going? To which the elder Tran responded, You dont want to ask. We just have to go.

At the time, the only way out of South Vietnam was by water. One of Trans cousins owned a small fishing boat. With gunfire sounding nearby, Tran remembers his uncle carrying the grandfather to the boat in his arms.

The boat was heavily overloaded with more than 60 people, and Trans parents were not yet on board. They had volunteered to find food for the family to last several days. In what Tran describes as a miracle, as the boat headed out to sea, his parents, having guessed where they thought the boat had to pass, swam to that spot and were waiting in the water when the boat indeed came by.

In their flight from Vietnam, the Trans left everything they ever knew or understood about life. Completely unable to help themselves, they entrusted themselves entirely to the Sacred Heart of Jesus.

Totally uncertain of their fate, after several days at sea, a naval vessel rescued the Tran family. They were transported to a refugee camp in Guam, then on to another refugee camp in Ft. Chaffee, Ark. From there, after a long wait, in cooperation with a local Quaker congregation, Catholic Social Services of Lincoln agreed to sponsor all 26 Tran family members.

Speaking no English, the family arrived in Lincoln and settled into a three-bedroom, one-bathroom house, near 27th and O streets in Lincoln.

All 26 lived together and Tran said, after a very long time of living in makeshift housing, the house seemed luxurious to them. In gratitude, the Tran family appeared at the sponsoring church. When they failed to see a crucifix, they realized it was not a Catholic church.

They were unaware of the local Catholic parish, but after searching, they found they were living mere blocks away from providentially Sacred Heart Catholic Church! Through their entire ordeal, the Trans had lovingly carried with them their most precious family treasure, the statue of the Sacred Heart of Jesus.

The adults found jobs and the children enrolled in school. Even without knowing English, Tran said he became an altar server and served at Mass every day.

Eventually, the family registered at Immaculate Heart of Mary, a Vietnamese-language parish in Lincoln. Tran attended Lincoln High School.

Later, a priest friend of the family invited the Tran boys to enroll at Lourdes Central Catholic School in Nebraska City. It was then Tran said, his faith came alive. He developed a deep personal relationship with Jesus Christ. He discovered a true friendship with God.

Through his entire ordeal, Tran said he learned and desired to, live the Bible by loving others as he had been loved.

Tran said his family encountered unimaginable kindness and charity in their journey to the United States. In addition, over the years, Tran said hes learned much from many people who were gladly willing to help.

Now it is my turn to help others, said Tran.

This devotion is evident in a life of service to his family, to his parish still Immaculate Heart of Mary and to the community. Tran is married to Tuyet Nguyen and they have two adult children, Mickey and Jonah. Trans life of service has blessed him with countless contacts with people from all walks of life.

Trans parents have since passed. Proudly on display in the home of Chuyen and Tuyet is his dads statue of the Sacred Heart of Jesus.

See original here:
Family who carried Sacred Heart statue were carried by Sacred ... - Catholic Diocese of Lincoln

The laughter is the tell. In a deftly written and acted scene in How to Blow Up a Pipeline, the new action-thriller directed by Daniel Goldhaber (and inspired by Andreas Malms identically titled 2021 book, which, unlike the film, does not describe how to blow up anything), a ragtag group of eight fossil-fuel saboteursyoung, diverse, mostly working class, several from polluted frontline communitiespass a bottle around, blowing off steam the night before they blow up a pipeline in the West Texas desert.

Theyre gonna call us revolutionaries, or game changers, offers Rowan (Kristine Froseth), a waifish blonde anarchist with a smirky grin. Somebody laughs. No, theyll call us terrorists, says dreadlocked, queer Theo (Sasha Lane). And Theo is right. You dont even have to sabotage a pipeline to be called a terrorist in this countryas weve seen in Georgia, where more than forty activists have been charged with domestic terrorism for allegedly damaging property and trespassing while protesting Atlantas Cop City.

But the laughter captures something else about our political-cultural era. Almost no one takes revolution seriouslynot even fictional would-be revolutionaries on screen. And not even in the face of our fossil-fuel driven global emergency. In fact, it would seem the only revolutionaries in this country are found on the far rightas a Proud Boy testified, their goal on Jan. 6, 2021, was all-out revolution.

Most interesting about Goldhabers filmwhich is that rare thing, a thoughtful political action movieis the way it dramatizes and draws out the fears and anxieties of climate activism at this stage of the crisis. (Full disclosure: Im among those whose advice was sought and given at an early stage of the project, but I had no involvement in the films making or any stake in it.) Like the book on which its based, its a film about risk, and the relationship to risk, individual and collective, personal and political. And it raises the deeply discomforting yet urgent question, as does Malms book, of what kinds and degrees of risk may be necessary, if any of us are serious about bringing the radical break with business-as-usual thats now requiredserious, that is, as players and not just chin-stroking, disinterested observers from the gallery. (There is no gallery in the climate catastrophe.) And yet for the most part the respectable left, and the climate left in particularas it goes through the same-old placid motions of politics-and-activism as usualsomehow manages to avoid this very question, even at this late hour.

What could possibly be at the root of this avoidance? Its almost as if a specter haunts the climate left: the specter of revolution, past and future.

To be fair, there are still some on the left who take revolution seriouslyat least on a historical, theoretical, and/or aesthetic levelbut they tend to haunt only the Ivory Tower. One thinks of Enzo Traversos Revolution: An Intellectual History (2021) as a recent example of such seriousness. But overall, theres broad agreement that nothing like a mass revolutionary-left movement actually exists today, other than in the imagination. The Left seems, Traverso writes in that volume, to have completely deserted the terrain on which it had, over the last century, accumulated considerable experience and recorded numerous successes: the armed revolution.

Whether armed or not, violent or not, the point is that revolution is approached seriously now only as history, as collective memory and mourning of the heroically vanquished and tragically betrayed. (Traverso explored this phenomenon in his 2016 book, Left-Wing Melancholia: Marxism, History, and Memory.) And, most often, as cautionary tale. The tragedy of revolutions, Traverso writes in Revolution, lies in the fatal metamorphosis that drives them from liberation to the struggle for survival, and finally to the edification of a new oppressive rule; from emancipating violence to coercive violence.

Of course much depends on what one actually means by revolutionTraverso means a suddenand almost always violentinterruption of the historical continuum . . . a break of the social and political order, which sounds about right to meand what one means by seriously.

China Miville, the acclaimed British novelist and nonfiction writer, wants to revive an explicitly Marxist revolutionary politics, updated for our century. His most recent books, October: The Story of the Russian Revolution (2017) and A Spectre, Haunting (2022), present the revolution of October 1917 and Marx and Engelss Communist Manifesto, respectively, as not only relevant to the present moment but as containing urgent insights and lessons, both positive and negative. Though historical, his project in these books is addressed directly to us, his contemporaries, as political actors, agents of history, potential revolutionary subjects.

This is an invigorating and even awe-inspiring act to behold, not least for the way Miville stares down the reflexive hackles of inveterate cynics. Fuck the cynics, Miville implies. The Manifestos authors, he reminds us, were thunderously uncynical, and Miville, too, is in earnest. He wants us to take revolution seriously not only as intellectual and political history but as living-breathing political practice in the present tense.

Accordingly, Mivilles A Spectre, Haunting is both a reintroduction of the Manifesto (drawing on the vast literature surrounding it) for a new generation of Marx-curious readers and a defense of revolutionary-left politics against the critics and skeptics, all along the ideological watchtower, who reject any such politics out of hand. The strongest weapon against revolution, or any hankering for it, he reminds his readers, is that capitalist-realist common sense that its impossible, even laughable, to struggle or hope for change. . . . a deliberate ruling-class propaganda strategy to discourage any belief in any such possibility.

TheManifestosauthors, he reminds us, were thunderously uncynical, and Miville, too, is in earnest. He wants us to take revolution seriously.

But Miville has no desire to prettify the lefts revolutionary history or engage in apologeticsquite the opposite. Non-dogmatic, full of caveats, and above all, ethically conscious, he engages the text of the Manifesto, its background, and its legacymuch of it brutal and indefensiblein order to preserve or salvage what remains inspiring and useful. To do so requires the readiness to break with Marxist doctrine, to see the past and present without ideological blinders (which is not to say without ideology). In his moving epilogue to October, Miville writes, We know where this is going: purges, gulags, starvation, mass murder. But perfect hindsight, he suggests, can breed illusions of inevitability. Did October lead inexorably to Stalin? he asks. It is an old question, but one still very much alive. Is the gulag the telos of 1917? Miville would have us resist any such interpretations as the sirens of historical necessity and fatalism. October is still ground zero for arguments about fundamental, radical social change, he writes. Its degradation was not a given, was not written in any stars.

What kind of revolution, then, is Miville hankering for (all caveats and disclaimers duly acknowledged)? Again taking his cue from the Manifesto and its authors, he is clearly not advocating a mere political revolution, that which topples a government and replaces it while leaving the underlying social order intact. Nevertheless, Miville wants a revolutionary left that allows for any number of models, including the possibility of peaceful revolutionwhich, he notes, Marx and Engels themselves did not rule out. What he wants to avoid is a strain of showboating machismo within the Left that dismisses anything less than the model of October 1917 as effete perfidy. And yet, he notes, that kind of toxic border-guarding no doubt arises in part from the fact that revolutionary is an easy word to throw around and domesticate. (Theyre gonna call us revolutionaries . . .)

Its clarifying, therefore, when Miville spells out, in the Manifestos terms, what he identifies as the three key elements of a Marxist social revolution worthy of the name. First, he writes, its aim is rupture. Its point isnt merely amelioration, but the overthrow of the existing order. Second, he tells us, this is a project with enemies. . . . To the ruling class as a class, this is an existential threat, to be fought by any means available. And their counter-revolutionary project might win. The all-important third point, then, is that revolutionists cannot shy away from the necessity of struggle.

Struggle, rupture, overthrow; but not, necessarily, by any means. Miville is no crude nihilist. He has a genuine concern for the moral-ethical basis of social revolution itself, even as found in the Manifesto, despite its authors claims to have thrown off all bourgeois morality. The relationship between coercion, force and violence is crucial here, Miville writes. Depending on how much social weight a movement has, how strategically it deploys it, actual violence, in no way a good in itself, can be minimized.

Indeed, on this crucial question, Miville goes on to argue that Marx and Engelss judgment of capitalist exploitation and oppression was itself an inherently moral oneas was their vision of the communist alternative. Marx and Engels, he notes, hold so-called civilization to be itself a barbarous and violent system. It follows, then, Miville writes:

This is not to be relaxed about violence on any side, but to contest the image of revolution as an irruption of violence into a peaceable system. Its to accept, rather, the necessity of violence against violence, to fight for the end of the mass death and social violence which underpins capitalism, surrounds us, at a greater scale today even than it did the Manifestos authors.

Mass death and social violence at a greater scale today . . . And were back to where we started: a global ecological and social catastrophe driven by fossil capital and the demands of untrammeled production and profitand the effort to stop it somewhere short of total destruction (an outcome, never mind what you may have heard, that is still very much on the table).

To his credit, Miville addresses the planetary crisis head-on in A Spectre, Haunting, but the discussion arrives, as it were, too little and too late, in a brief section sandwiched into the final chapter. Like so many of his peers among left intellectuals, Miville is slow to come around to the climate catastrophe. If he took it as seriously as called for, it would frame the whole book; treating it as an afterthought wont do any longer. Its been said before, but perhaps the full implications of climate science are simply too radical, even for radicals. That is, climate catastrophe threatens the material conditions on which the whole socialist project rests. Miville, as a founding member of the Salvage Collective, knows this well, of course, and it goes to the heart of his response to the crisis:

To read the Manifesto today, is to have to acknowledge that after centuries of exploitation and planetary degradation, the rupture is more urgent than everand is unlikely to be into a realm of freedom and plenty, but of necessary slow repair.

There is a world to win: won, it must be fixed. This is ruin communism, or salvage communism. As part of such project, nave dreams of profligacy have to be set aside.

Won, it must be fixed. I wish this were convincing. But the problem with Mivilles formulation, and its not an uncommon one, is the assumption that we still have time to win the worldon Marxist terms, no lessbefore we begin to fix it. In fact, according to climate science, we barely have time to stop the hemorrhaging. Its one thing to keep the revolutionary flame alive, and to make the non-falsifiable claim that another world is possible, that the revolution this time may succeed without betraying its principles and devouring its own. Its another thing entirely when you slam up against the hard limits of physics and chemistryand time. If you insist that the social revolutionrather than something like the mere political varietymust come first, then theres a strong chance that there wont be a world to win, nothing to salvage.

Andreas Malm is a Marxist intellectual and agitator who not only grasps this grim truth about our situation but says it out loudeven writes books about it.

In his pamphlet Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency: War Communism in the Twenty-First Century (2020)which preceded How to Blow Up a Pipeline by just a few months in the midst of the pandemics first yearMalm lays out the case for strong medicine, what he calls ecological Leninism, to stem the planetary catastrophe. He argues that only centralized state powernationalization of all private companies extracting and processing and distributing fossil fuels, along with comprehensive, airtight planningcan accomplish what is required at this emergency juncture. Everybody knows this, Malm writes. Few say it. And so, speed being paramount (Delay is fatal, as Lenin said), Malms ecological Leninism leaps at any opportunity to wrest the state in this direction, break with business-as-usual as sharply as required and subject the regions of the economy working towards catastrophe to direct public control.

But Malm goes further, wisely or not, suggesting that even something like war communism may be necessary, invoking the nascent Bolshevik regimes desperate and brutal measures during its struggle to survive the Russian Civil War. Malm, of course, is far from the first to call for something resembling wartime mobilization to address the climate emergency, but the term war communism, he admits, tends to leave an acid taste. Rightly so. (His use of it, hes quick to add, is not to suggest that we should have summary executions, send food detachments into the countryside or militarize labor, just as no one who looks at World War II as a model for climate mobilization wants to drop another atomic bomb on Hiroshima.) What Malm is calling for here is not ruthless, unrestrained state power, but an emergency power thats democratically and ethically grounded. He is quite ready to throw out those parts of the Marxist-Leninist playbook that are ripe (or overripe) for their own obituaries.

Not least among those is the doctrine that prescribes first demolishing the capitalist state and replacing it with a socialist one. The capitalist state is all we have in the near termand with climate, the near term is what matters. No workers state based on soviets will be miraculously born in the night, Malm writes. Waiting for it would be both delusional and criminal.

What Malm is calling for here is not ruthless, unrestrained state power, but an emergency power thats democratically and ethically grounded.

Whats more, as Malm is well aware, given the current state of our politics there is no reason to assume that any revolutionary rupture will come from the left or result in a left-wing government; if anything, theres more reason to fear a neo-fascist takeover than any sort of totalitarian left. (Malm has explored the intersection of climate and the fascist threat in depth, in his 2021 book with the Zetkin Collective,White Skin, Black Fuel: On the Danger of Fossil Fascism.) Its possible that from now on, any viable left will have to resemble a Popular Front anti-fascist coalition: the fight against fascism and the fight against fossil capitalbeing one and the same.

But Malm makes clear that his ecological Leninism is a conceptual framework, a set of principles, not marching orders. Nor does it imply, he goes on, that there are any actual Leninist formations capable of seizing power and implementing the correct measures. To the contrary, The crisis is the absencethe complete, gaping absenceof any leadership. And so the dreary bourgeois state will have to be forced, more or less as it is, through popular uprising and a diversity of tactics (including mass sabotage), to save itself. Then, at least, a reborn revolutionary left may live to fight another day.

However unlikely to be realized Malms vision may be, and he knows that it appears very unlikely, those elements of the climate movement and the left that pretend that none of this needs to happen . . . are not being honest, he writes. This is undoubtedly true. Somebody had to say it.

Every concrete measure proposed here, Malm concludes, may well be brushed aside as utopian. They are exactly as utopian as survival.

A year or two ago, around the time Malms How to Blow Up a Pipeline was belatedly discovered by the mainstream press, I was asked by a reporter for a major newspaper, off the record, just how far Id be willing to go as a climate-justice activist in the struggle against the fossil-fuel industry and its political backers. I told him, speaking as one who has supported and engaged in escalated, nonviolent direct action for more than a decade, that I honestly didnt know. (And if I did know, I probably wouldnt tell a reporter, on or off the record.) Truth is, I still dont. But its a good questionand not only for a climate activist but for anyone involved in left politics now.

The answer no doubt depends upon how you understand the present momentwhether youve really taken on board, not only rationally but viscerally, based on the prevailing scientific and political realities, just how desperate the human situation on this planet really is, especially for the vast majority of people whove done little or nothing to cause the catastrophe. After thirty-plus years of failure on climate policy by the Global North, with global greenhouse emissions still at record levels, surely any informed and decent person living in one of the worlds most historically culpable countries will be moved to ask what can and must be done to at least reduce the suffering and salvage a livable future, one with the possibility of social justice.

The risks to revolutionists are, indeed, enormous. But the alternativeclimate breakdown plus fascism, genocide, in short, barbarismis intolerable.

Chances are, though, even if you identify as a socialist of some sort, the option of engaging in a revolutionary-left political movement wont cross your mind. Maybe youd prefer, if you can afford it, to go shopping instead: buy an EV, an electric heat pump, some solar panels for your roof. Too bourgeois? Then perhaps switch to a plant-based diet; attend a protest; canvass for a political candidate;maybe even get arrested. And post about all of it on social media. All good and worthwhile things. But to actually try to help bring about the urgent and necessary radical break with the political and economic system thats driving the destruction? In a country crawling with heavily armed right-wing militants and a militarized police/surveillance state itching to use its latest toys? What kind of fool do you think I am?

At this point, one might reasonably ask: If any serious revolutionary-left politics has been all but dead for at least a generation or two, and if theres no sign on the horizon of a movement capable of taking power and forcing the radical shift requiredif even mere Bernie Sanders-style political revolution appears far-fetched at presentwhat is the point of talking about any of this? Why bother?

In fact, one might just as well ask what is the point, at this late hour, of talking about any alternative political, social, or ecological visionof any hope that a better world, even a salvaged one, is still possiblewithout taking seriously the urgent necessity of a radical rupture with business-and-politics as usual. For the climate movement and the broader left to settle for anything less than mere political revolutionto resign ourselves to head-in-sand incrementalism while dreaming of an abundant green socialismis to settle for a global ecocide amounting to genocide for large parts of humanity, primarily in the Global South but not only there; the North will not be spared.

If this is the case, then it would seem that the task for those of us who refuse to settle, and who choose to engage, is to urgently shift our social movements, in broad solidarity and coalition, toward the making or remaking of a revolutionary left politics. This means building a movement of movements, as many of us have insisted for years, committed to rupture, ready to take power democratically, and ready to use it effectively.

This, in turn, means building a movement culture of risk-taking, both personal and collective; of sacrifice, when necessary; and of resolve, once committed, to stay in the fight.

And the risks are, indeed, enormous. But the alternativeclimate breakdown plus fascism, genocide, in short, barbarismis intolerable. Business-, politics-, and activism-as-usual are already catastrophic. Continuing on the current path is the greatest risk of all. There are, in fact, no safe options. (No one knows this better than climate-justice activists Jessica Reznicek and Ruby Montoya, who were sentenced to eight and six years in prison, respectively, for their sabotage of the Dakota Access Pipeline in 2016-2017.)

As Im sure Malm would admit, its possible that literally blowing up pipelines will not turn out to be the wisest of tactics. Deliberately spiking oil prices (as Goldhabers fictional saboteurs aim to do), placing an economic burden on poor and working-class people, is probably not the way to build bottom-up power. Then again, who am I to say?

What we can say, as any seasoned movement strategist knowsand as Goldhabers film seems to forgetis that a revolutionary act, no matter how spectacular, does not a revolutionary movement make. Revolutionary tactics do not, of themselves, amount to a revolutionary politics. Only movements are capable of revolution.

But Im with Malm in the assessment that the willingness to take large risksincluding the willingness to break things, in particular the things that are breaking the very biospherewould seem a minimum requirement for any revolutionary-left movement worthy of the name. That is, any movement that takes seriously not only human survival but human solidaritythat most utopian of endsfor which many in history, let us never forget, have risked and given everything. And for which some of us, it may yet be discovered, still will.

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Risk and Revolution | Wen Stephenson - The Baffler

TheHolodomor: 27 million dead.

The Gulag: 1.5 million dead.

The Great Leap Forward: 30 million dead.

These are just some of the grisly atrocities documented at theVictims of Communism Museum. Communism has left a trail of blood from Potsdam to Peking. The museum is dedicated to the memory of the some 100 million people who have lost their lives to this odious ideology.

The museum has been open for nearly a year, yet it has received little recognition in the mainstream press. AWashington Poststory on the museumnoted without irony that this philosophy that killed tens of millions also inspired generations of activists in America. Apparently, the museum isnt balanced enough in its history of communism. Next to the exhibit on Stalins crimes they need to note the legions of left-wing labor activists it provided guidance to. Thats a sad reflection of our times: another indication that, at its philosophical foundation, the modern West struggles to contemplate and understand the wreckage that was imposed on millions of people by Marxist communist states. The reasons why are troubling and indicate that certain forms of Marxist ideology seeped into the Western mind, although not to the point that the American-led West was unable to defeat the Soviet Union.

>>>How Cultural Marxism Threatens the United Statesand How Americans Can Fight It

Its easy to think of communism as an unfortunate system afflicting poor souls in the far reaches of the earth. As British historian Arnold Toynbee sardonically put it, History is something unpleasant that happens to other people.

Yet history is never far from us. Substantial forms of the same spirit that animated the Bolsheviks run rampant in the West today.

The hesitancy of news outlets to recognize the importance of the Victims of Communism Museum has been entirely in keeping with the refusal of Western elites to reckon morally with communisms casualties. Why wouldnt leading outlets cover a museum that details the atrocities of communism, one of the biggest human-rights disasters of the 20th century? FromNew York TimescorrespondentWalter Durantyand Vice PresidentHenry Wallaceto Prime MinisterJustin TrudeauandHollywood, there has been no shortage of prominent communist sympathizers. We do not say that media outlets refusing to report on the museum are engaged in the same moral degradation as was Duranty, who lied about the Ukrainian starvation by Stalin. However, many Western thinkers and politicians found the ideology attractive or felt the need to dismiss its opponents. Why?

Alexander Solzhenitsyn spoke to this point eloquently in his famedHarvard commencement address of 1978. While the audience expected a nicely delineated comparison between a wicked communist East and a free, liberal West, Solzhenitsyn excoriated the latter, characterizing it as afflicted with the same sickness that led to the horrors of the surveillance state, the KGB, and the Gulag.

The seed that bore this bitter fruit was planted centuries ago, he claimed, in the soil of Renaissance humanism, when man turned his gaze from God to himself and embraced the aphorism of Protagoras, Man, the measure of all things. Looking upon his own desires, he soon pursued earthly pleasures until everything beyond physical well-being and the accumulation of material goods, all other human requirements and characteristics of a subtler and higher nature, were left outside the area of attention of state and social systems, as if human life did not have any higher meaning.

Mans focus on himself reduced him to the material, temporal world. Whereas before he had seen himself as both spiritual and physical, his worldview was now diminished solely to the latter. Unshackled from piety, he was in his behavior not beholden to a superior being, nor did his ends remain spiritual.

As he further developed the arts of science, technology, and industrial scale, the Renaissance humanist abolished the physical limits that had been present since his beginning. Thus the modern world rose from the spires of Western Europe, destined to conquer the globe.

On this topic, Leo Strauss frequently referred to a quotation of Horace: You can drive out nature with a pitchfork, but she will come back. Modern man rejected that sentiment as he exercised his industrial prowess.

What results are two sides of the same modernist coin. Communism rejects the dignity of the human person, rejects the existence of God, and rejects moral truth itself. In its aim to abolish the family, religion, and private property, which are merely institutions that capital owners control to maintain power, communist ideology casts a totalizing control over the human soul. In the end, communism in practice must violently reject all higher limits that had been placed before it, in the hopes of creating the workers paradise.

Western liberalism, on the other hand, maintained limits for man as long as religious faith remained its foundation. Solzhenitsyn pointed out that the rights enumerated in the early American republic were granted on the ground that man is Gods creature. That is, freedom was given to the individual conditionally, in the assumption of his constant religious responsibility. Divine limits were preeminent in the American Founding and were what allowed for such freedoms to be permitted by the republic.

With the leaps of industrial prowess, though, Man continued his turn from God that began in the humanist age. Increasingly, he eschewed those limits instilled by God and nature and turned toward what he could accomplish materially.

The communist East had violently abolished the limits and duties of man. The liberal West had discarded them voluntarily.

Modern man, impious, statist, and commercial, is left with only earthly ends. This false anthropology of the godlike man has become firmly entrenched in both communist and liberal nations. The former believes that man as the state can achieve all aims; the latter, that man as individual can do the same.

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This abandonment of the spiritual ends and limits is why so many in the West cannot condemn the crimes of communism. The ideology provides an end in their temporal world, in which man need not adhere to the natural limits placed on him.

The words of Solzhenitsyn cry out this inevitability: The current of materialism which is farthest to the left, and is hence the most consistent, always proves to be stronger, more attractive, and victorious. Humanism which has lost its Christian heritage cannot prevail in this competition. Of course, American military, technological, political, and moral power provided the crucial reserves in defeating the Soviet Union. Reagan invoked spiritual and moral sentiments in his challenge to communism and rallied the opponents of communism to defeat it. The West was not wholly unregenerate, a fact that Solzhenitsyn overlooked. But he still accurately grasped the trends in Western thought that have led it to turn on its biblical heritage.

With those words in mind, we should contemplate the horrors shown at the Victims of Communism Museum not as distant historical facts but as the eventuality of the fallacy of hope that is modernity. This is not a call to return to a premodern age, which is neither possible nor desirable. Rather, we should seek to reignite that piety that understands man as Gods creation, not self-made, that recognizes our limits, and that sees our end not in an earthly paradise of this world but in the everlasting world of the hereafter.

Solzhenitsyn closed with declaring that the world will demand from us a spiritual blaze. If we want a viable alternative to a closed world of abysmal ends, then we would do well to heed him.

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Victims of Communism, Victims of Modernism - Heritage.org