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May 7, 2018 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin
32:40
This Week in Stupid (06⧸05⧸2018)
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Hey folks, before I start the video, I'd just like to thank everyone who donated to my GoFummy campaign.
I reached the target in about four hours, and within the first day I'd more than doubled it.
And special thank you to my anonymous benefactor who donated $10,000, and Notch as well.
Dude, you are a legend.
But everyone, thank you so much.
You've given me so much peace of mind.
Hello everyone, welcome to this week in Stupid for the 6th of May 2018.
Sorry this episode's so late.
I was at the Day for Freedom in London today, and I will be uploading a video of my speech at some point in the week.
It was a really good day, and the whole event was incredibly well attended, and the whole thing had an atmosphere like it was a festival rather than a protest.
Everyone was having a really great time, apart from the few hundred anti-fargoons who turned up.
I stood by and watched as the column of people marched from Hyde Park to Whitehall, and it was like an army.
It was amazing.
Needless to say, I have never spoken in front of such a large crowd of people, and I was pretty nervous.
But there is one thing I want to address, and that was that there was a Muslim man called Ali Dawah, who I'm not really very familiar with, but apparently he'd had run-ins with Tommy Robinson and whatnot in the past.
And I don't know what really happened, but at some point he was attacked, and for some reason he wasn't allowed to take the stage because he was due to be a speaker, which I thought was a very fine idea given that sunlight is the best disinfectant.
And if he was brave enough to go and speak to what was inevitably going to be a hostile crowd, then I would have applauded him for doing so regardless whether I agreed with him or not.
But other than that, the event went so well, even The Guardian couldn't write a bad article about it.
The worst they could do is call us far right.
And if you're as far left as the Guardian, of course anything that even approaches the centre looks like it's far right.
Thousands of far right protesters march in London in support of free speech.
My goodness, you'd think that they'd have some kind of moment of self-awareness, because either the far right, quote unquote, is becoming enormous, or there are lots of people who aren't far right who have reasonable concerns.
Thousands marched through London under the banner of free speech on Sunday after Tommy Robinson, a former leader of the far-right English Defence League, was permanently banned from Twitter.
Protesters flying national flags and holding placards decrying limits to free expression rallied at Whitehall after marching through central London from Speaker's Corner in Hyde Park, a location seen as emblematic of free speech that has been the scene of several recent far-right rallies.
So Tommy Robinson and several prominent right-wing figures, which is literally anyone according to The Guardian, addressed the 2,000 to 3,000 attendees.
There were undoubtedly more than 2-3,000 people.
This was an enormous rally.
Lines of police with riot vans separated the protesters from several hundred counter-protesters.
I think that's a bit of an optimistic number to be honest with you.
And given the size of the pro-free speech rally, they melted away pretty damn quickly.
There was a bit of kerfuffle before the crowds had really assembled, but after that, they just disappeared.
Probably because the crowds were swelled by support from the Democratic Football Lads Alliance, an umbrella group for football ultras turned from Piccadilly into Whitehall they chanted Robinson's name.
These are people who will normally be unkindly called football hooligans.
Not the kind of people that Antifar usually want to have any dealing with, because of the sort of people who will beat the crap out of Antifar.
Paul Stevenson, 42 from Harrow, said he was marching to protect freedom of speech.
Wow, what a Nazi.
It's to protest all the censorship that's going on.
Political correctness, cultural Marxism, and attacks on the white Christian culture, not just in this country, but across Europe.
Okay, where's the lie?
Numbers dwindled throughout the lengthy Whitehall march, apparently, but I didn't notice that.
If anything, it seemed that the numbers were growing.
I mean, by the time I took the stage, I couldn't see the back of the crowd.
But the Guardian writer does point out that the atmosphere was unthreatening.
I actually did a quick interview with this chap, and he was very polite, and I'm genuinely impressed at how reliably he quoted the people that he's quoting here.
In his rally speech, Robinson said, The people of this country have been silenced for 20 to 30 years with the tag of racists.
They've managed to silence people so they are too scared to speak up when they see that things are wrong.
They now realize that the tag is dead.
No one cares anymore with being labelled racists.
Categorically true, Dr. Alexis J attested to this in her Rotherham Inquiry.
It is the tag of racist that is silencing people because of the social stigma that comes with being labeled a racist.
Unfortunately for the far left, this weapon was so powerful they thought they could just use it indefinitely.
And now they find that it's lost almost all of its power.
Yiannopoulos told the crowd, truth and righteousness are behind you.
You're the vanguard.
You're the dark knights.
Knights with an N. Dude, I think he clearly was talking about dark knights with a K. What sense would it make for them to be dark knights?
The first men and women to stand proudly with your heads above the parapets, caring nothing for the bullets that come your way and I salute you.
I saw what happened when Nick Griffin went on question time.
In America, when genuine racists appear on television, when those people are exposed to the harsh light of day, I believe sunlight is the best disinfectant.
And what's wrong with that?
A completely sensible thing to say.
It was the end of the British National Party and their bigotry when they went on TV and just explained to people how bigoted that they were.
This is why free speech works, because most people are not bigots.
Carl Benjamin, whose alias is Sagan of Akkad, said the protest was against totalitarianism, identity politics, and Islamism, which is really the same thing.
Because it is.
Islamism is a form of identity politics, and all identity politics are inherently totalitarian.
I also said, and he accurately quotes me again, those protesting against them were only in favour of curated speech.
Which they are.
And I absolutely stand by what was printed here.
I think that these people were entirely interested in curated speech.
They were not interested in free speech at all.
They want to be able to tell you what you can say.
And they want to punish you when you say something you shouldn't.
On the other side of the lines, Freddy Hyde Thompson, 28 from London, I wonder what his father does, was shocked to find the counter-protesters outnumbered.
That's amazing, isn't it?
We're so relaxed, we're so bourgeois, we've got this.
Wait.
Oh my god, the working class are everywhere and I can't stand it.
Someone do something about the revolting proletariat.
It's really worrying, he said.
This cannot come to London and there'd be more of them than there are of us.
Hyde Thompson saw the protesters' claims of supporters' free speech as a contradiction.
If their freedom of speech is going to rub out other people's freedom of speech, then they've got no point.
How exactly are they going to rub out someone else's freedom of speech if they're saying everyone should be able to speak?
If they want to ban certain religions, that speaks for itself.
I actually wasn't able to hear the speeches from any of the other speakers yet, because standing in the area at the back, you couldn't really hear what was being said on the stage.
It was being projected in the other direction.
So I don't know if anyone was actually calling for the banning of Islam.
But I don't think that's generally what most people want.
I think most people would agree to have Muslims and non-Muslims treated with the same set of rules.
And honestly, I think that there is no room for political Islam in the same way that we prescribe Nazi ideology for being innately hateful to certain groups that we have protected because of their innate characteristics.
For example, Jews and gays.
People that, just so happens, Nazis don't happen to like either.
But I don't think I've ever heard anyone say you can't be a Muslim in your own personal life, as long as you just keep it there.
And I really don't think that's an unreasonable demand for a secular country to make, especially given how it's the same demand we make of every other religion.
Among those watching the speakers and videos was Fatima, a black Muslim woman who would not give her full name.
I'm here for freedom of speech, she said, adding that she did not feel threatened.
It's weird if they want to get rid of Islam and kill all Muslims.
It's weird that this black Muslim woman was like, no, no, seems fairly safe.
Which is incidentally what I had a conversation with Mike Stuckhamberry with.
You might remember him from his Twitter fame.
It'll be up in a day or two.
It's a good interview.
It's okay, I'm in my element.
I don't really care.
This is England.
There's a guy with an infidel shirt right in front of me.
I don't know how he would react to me.
This is a bit awkward to all of us.
Since we're talking about Islam, can you be a Muslim if you're an atheist?
Spoiler alert, the answer's no.
The tagline to this is: an atheist finds solidarity across Muslim cultural identity in America following Donald Trump's travel ban.
The atheist in question is from Pakistan and went to the West and found that he did not believe in Islam after being here, but he happens to like the culture of Islam.
Which in and of itself is very interesting because it's again the guardian, the far left, admitting that there is a unique cultural identity to Islam, to the word Muslim, that this atheist wishes to affiliate.
And that really does speak to the problem that we are having in Britain and the rest of Europe, frankly, with the Islamist groups that are around.
They are taking the identity of Muslim and saying this is more important than your distinct national identities.
Needless to say, this is coming into great conflict with the working classes of Britain and other places in Europe, who take great pride in their national identities and find them to be very important.
If you say your national identity isn't important, my identity as a quote-unquote Muslim is more important.
This leads to conflict because identities are about a set of values.
They're not just arbitrary, there is something backing them up.
But again, I'll talk about this more in my British Values talk in Scarborough.
So the author compares himself to American Jews, of whom 22% don't consider themselves religious.
That's a remarkably low number, now that I think about it.
I would have thought that there would have been a far larger number of atheistic, secular American Jews.
And naturally, it means that secular Jews have little problems transgressing the boundaries laid down in Judaic law.
He says, like I suspect many secular Jews, I now take a delight in eating pork that exceeds the merely culinary.
In the flesh of swine, gustatory pleasure is mingled with a sense of liberation.
Does having this experience mean I'm not a Muslim?
Or did I have to be a Muslim in order for it to take place?
Well, it sounds to me very much like you're rebelling against being Muslim.
The sense of liberation one feels from eating a kind of food means that you must have been oppressed in some way.
Otherwise, what are you being liberated from?
Bad Muslims eat pork sometimes and drink beer.
It's not actually that big a deal as far as I can tell.
I think the bigger problem is that you don't believe in God.
This raises a more fundamental question.
Are you a Muslim if you don't follow religious precepts or even hold religious beliefs?
Well, again, you could be culturally a Muslim if there was a single Muslim culture, but we are told repeatedly that there isn't a single Muslim culture.
So what kind of Muslim are you pretending to be?
It also raises an unavoidable comparison.
Can there be Muslims without Islam in the same way that there are Jews without Judaism?
It's very interesting actually because in the case of Islam the answers are very clear no.
Jews actually have a kind of racial lineage.
There is actually a genetic pattern to being Jewish that can be detected with an ancestry test.
But you can't exactly do the same thing with Islam because it is just a religion.
Which is, of course, what he says.
Islam departs from Judaism on the question of definition, in that Jewishness is sometimes determined by lineage rather than belief.
Islam, on the other hand, has always been a proselytizing religion, spreading from the Middle East to include not just South Asians, but large number of Bosnians, Indonesians, and African Americans.
So yeah.
What race are you planning to claim is Muslim?
Quoting Edward Saeed, a Palestinian Christian, he says, Islam is of course a religion, but it is also a culture.
The Arabic language is the same for Muslims as it is for Christians, both of whom, believers and non-believers alike, are deeply affected, perhaps the better word is infected, by the Quran, which is also in Arabic.
The problem is, is Muslim culture very well adjusted for apostates?
That's what you're going to have to find out the hard way.
Especially when you go on to quote the Islamic State, who say that in their journal Dabik, they bemoaned the grey zone in which Western Muslims are able to exist.
I can't imagine that they would have been very open to the idea of atheistic Muslims.
And so we come to his dilemma.
He was at a cash register when someone asked him, are you a Muslim?
I hesitated at the question, as I always do being a non-believer.
I have not been above taking some mischievous pleasure in telling more pious members of my extended family that I'm an atheist.
That's very brave, but I suppose when you're living in America, you don't have to be too worried about being an apostate.
But in that day, I realized that what he was asking had little to do with religious faith.
He was asking if I had a family in a country to which American borders might become closed.
If I might find myself in a secret watch list due to my name or the stamps on my passport, if I tended to get selected for random screening at airports, and everyone knows they are far from random, if I feared for my family's safety from not just domestic terrorism, but from retribution, both by violent vigilantes and legal state apparatus, visited upon scapegoats identified by a rough equivalence of skin tone.
Yes, I said, I am a Muslim.
Why?
We have already established that Muslims do not come in any one particular skin tone.
If he had said, are you Arabic?
You could have said, of course I am.
Look at my skin tone, but he's actually not, he's Pakistani.
But even then, Arabs and Pakistanis don't have the same skin tone.
And what's the difference in skin tone between a Pakistani and an Indian?
Not much.
You could just say no, and he'd say, oh, sorry, I don't know why I asked.
But then, we exchanged salaams, and then he handed me the bacon, egg, and cheese sandwich he'd just made me, and I headed for the train.
Well, if he's a practicing Muslim, and you're ordering bacon in front of him, maybe he thinks that now you're a liar.
But either way, this was a kind of backhanded way of saying the Muslim identity is an important one, and that's what he's trying to point out here, whether he's actually an adherent or not.
The identity and culture is what he wants to identify with, whether or not he believes anything.
And that's the problem.
There actually is a kind of powerful, multinational, and supremacist identity attached to the word Muslim.
Not every Muslim feels this way, of course, but many of them do, and a small minority are absolutely fanatical about this and cause absolute havoc in the communities in which they reside.
And I really think that the reason that Islam is such a hot topic for the followers of Tommy Robinson is that this identity is coming into conflict with the native identities of Europe.
One of them has to win out, and it has to be the European ones.
And the reason I say this is because while I'm sure there are absolutely millions of lovely Muslims who would never think about weaponizing their identity against other people, there are also Muslims who will weaponize their identity against other people.
For example, Italian police.
Muslim migrants threw Christians overboard, their refugee boats heading to Italy.
Muslims who were among migrants trying to get from Libya to Italy by boat this week threw 12 fellow passengers overboard, killing them because the 12 were Christians, Italian police have said.
The Italian authorities have arrested 15 people on suspicion of murdering the Christians at sea, police in Palermo, Sicily said.
The original group of 105 people left Libya on Tuesday in a rubber boat.
This is the legitimate way to get into Europe.
Sometime during the trip north across the Mediterranean Sea, the alleged disalens, Muslims from the Ivory Coast, Mali and Senegal, threw the 12 overboard.
Other people on the voyage told police that they themselves were spared because they very strongly opposed the drowning attempt and formed a human chain.
Alright, not because the people doing the drowning had a change of heart or anything, but just they weren't able to carry on drowning people.
The boat was intercepted by an Italian Navy vessel which transferred the passengers to a Panamanian flagship.
And the thing is, while many die each year attempting the voyage, often when boats capsized, in this case, it doesn't appear that the boat was about to capsize.
It appears that the Muslims on this boat decided that they simply did not want the Christians on board and decided to kill them because they were not Muslims.
This is the problem with Islam and the identity of Muslim.
It actually does make it permissible to do violence and kill the unbeliever because it's right there in the bloody scriptures.
Not all Muslims follow this, but you can't say that it's not there.
Which means some of them will follow it, especially the ones that think it's the literal word of God.
There is a reason that Hitchin said that Islam has bloody borders, and it is because the identities that fall outside the identity of Muslim, as we see in all of the grooming gang scandals, allow certain Muslims to say, well, they're not part of the Ummah, and therefore they have no worth.
Speaking of having no worth, let's talk about my country.
My country is fucking falling apart.
Let's take this story that's reported in the Daily Mirror.
You are fucking weak.
Shocking viral video shows female army recruit reduced to tears as instructor hurls abuse at her.
The instructor may face a court-martial after footage emerged of him screaming at the recruit, reducing her to tears.
I'm sorry, that's the wrong way around.
If you're in the army and you can't take your instructor yelling at you because you're doing a bad job of stabbing a dummy to death, you need to be kicked out of the fucking army.
So the footage which was posted to Facebook shows the foul-mouthed instructor hurling abuse at a woman during a bayonet exercise.
She begins to cry uncontrollably as the instructor launches another verbal attack while they are stood in fast-flowing water.
The instructor is now facing a court-martial as senior officials attempt to track him down.
The instructor did nothing wrong.
I come from a military family.
I've had lots of friends who have been in the military, who have gone through events like this.
One of them who in fact ended up commanding a tank division in Iraq.
They do this because you are going to have to bayonet another human being to death.
This is a very stressful situation and you are put in a very stressful situation in order to train for it.
And if you can't do it, if you break down and start crying, you are not army material.
End of fucking story.
In the clip, the corporal can be heard screaming, get the fuck here, at the terrified trainee, and continues to shout, you are not a killer, as she attacks the dummy.
Well, I've got to say, I don't think she fucking is.
As the distressed woman begins to cry, the corporal continues to shower her abuse, screaming, you are fucking weak.
She fucking is.
And I would say this, whether it was a man or a woman, I do not give a damn about the gender of the person who is fucking weak in this circumstance.
If you are not going to be able to stand up to an instructor calling you a weakling and saying that you're not a killer, you are not fit to bayonet the enemy on the battlefield and you should not be in the army.
But I hate the way the mirror portrays this.
Disturbingly, the instructor pretends to have a change of heart, suggesting the woman has completed the exercise before shouting, you are far from the end.
Yeah, the instructor doesn't hate her.
The instructor is doing what he has to do in order to prepare her for the fact that the person that she is going to have to kill is going to be trying to kill her in return.
It's a life and death situation.
If she gets into the field, finds herself presented with an enemy and bursts into fucking tears, she's dead.
He is doing her a favor.
But the mail showed this video to the former head of the army, Lord Dannett, and he said, I hope the identity of the corporal is discovered very quickly and that he is removed from the army at the earliest possible moment.
Tomorrow would be a day too late.
This kind of behavior is totally unacceptable.
Get fucked.
This kind of behavior is absolutely necessary.
And to not train the soldiers with this kind of rigor would be doing them a disservice.
This instructor did nothing wrong.
Heading over to Northern Ireland to find that we're about to ban drills after a woman is in a critical condition after a drill attack in County Tyrone.
The victim sustained a very serious head injury and exploring a possible homophobic motive for the crime, which is the most important thing for you guys to investigate when it comes to this crime.
Detective Sergeant Brian Reid said this is a brutal attack and injury sustained by the victim extremely grave.
I imagine Sadiq Khan's going to be out on a soapbox tomorrow saying there's no reason to have a drill.
And I know you're thinking, well, that's the stupidest damn thing.
A man in Scotland is in court for having a potato peeler in a public place.
You fucking heard me.
A man ended up behind bars after being found in a Dunfurland Street with an offensive weapon, a potato peeler.
What the fuck is wrong with my country?
He admitted that on Saturday in Appen Crescent, a public place, he was in possession of an object which had a blade or was sharply pointed, namely a potato peeler.
Q Sadiq Khan, there's no reason anyone could ever need a potato peeler.
Potato peeler amnesty.
The defense solicitor said her client suffers from significant learning difficulties which have been lifelong.
Presumably because he couldn't learn the fucking rules about what you could carry around with you.
The thing is, they haven't even sentenced him yet.
Who knows what kind of sentence this guy is going to get?
He's going to go to court on May the 16th and get sentenced for carrying a fucking potato peeler.
For Christ's sake.
I feel like I've gone mad and this is probably why his defense solicitors like, oh yeah, he's got significant learning difficulties.
He's had them his whole life.
What do you mean?
Well, he just can't figure out why we're criminalizing him for carrying a potato peeler.
We have the 200th birthday of Karl Marx, a man who, according to the far left press in my country, didn't do fucking nothing.
Two centuries on, Karl Marx feels more revolutionary than ever.
Have we not had enough communist revolutions to know that it goddamn well doesn't work?
I'm not even reading this.
From The Independent.
Karl Marx's 200th anniversary.
The world is finally ready for Marxism as capitalism reaches the tipping point.
Finally ready.
It's not the bloody history of the 20th century that was caused by Marxism.
Oh no, no, no, we haven't tried that yet.
We're finally ready for it.
Get fucked.
I'm not even reading it.
What's that?
John Claude Juncker, the head of the European Commission, giving a vigorous defense of Karl Marx and his philosophies.
Get fucked, Junker.
I'm not even reading that either.
Oh, what a surprise.
Vice magazine.
Karl Marx has never been more relevant.
And would you look at that?
It's his 200th birthday this weekend.
Why have the bourgeois classes converted wholesale to Marxism?
If we were to overthrow the bourgeoisie and implement the dictatorship of the proletariat, it means that we would have to go down to all of these goddamn bourgeois outlets and kill them all for being part of the oppressive class.
Maybe they're on something.
I'm joking.
Just as I assume Tria, the German city where Marx was born, is joking when they release zero Euro notes to celebrate Karl Marx's birthday.
Now, I'm sure that the idea behind this is that Marx wanted to abolish money and so abolish private property so there'd be no need for money so people would just take what they wanted whenever they wanted it.
And the ironic dual meaning of this is that if you try to implement Marx's ideas, your money will be worth nothing and you will starve.
And the third ironic thing about this is that they're making money from Karl Marx's name in their beautiful capitalist system because they're selling them for three Euros a pop.
This was meant to be a homage to Karl Marx, the man responsible for the most deaths in all of human history, whether he wanted them to happen or not, even though he did argue for a violent revolution to overthrow the bourgeoisie, so he was calling for a genocide.
Not sure why he's considered to be a good guy, but hey, that's just me.
i'm anti-genocide not pro-genocide like some kind of wacky bleeding heart liberal but honestly the fact that they're worth nothing is just but of course the funniest thing about all of this was slavoj zizek's the famous marxist philosopher publishing his inevitable carl marx did nothing wrong article 200 years later, we can say that Marx was often very right, but in a much more literal way than he intended.
No, I don't think we can say that, actually, Savoy, and I think you'll explain to us why.
He begins with a nostalgic joke from the Soviet Union, which really just makes me want to avoid Marxism even further.
There was a delicious old Soviet joke about a radio Yerevan listener.
Is it true that Rabinovich won a new car in the lottery?
The radio presenter answers, in principle, yes, it's true.
Only it wasn't a new car, but an old bicycle.
And he didn't win it, but it was stolen from him.
Not really a great advertisement for saying Karl Marx was right, is it?
Suggesting that Marx's policies, genocides aside, saying that Marx's policies made the Soviet Union so poor they had to joke about the fact that it was so unbelievably corrupt that they would steal old bicycles.
But anyway, is Marx's theory still relevant today?
We can guess the answer.
In principle, yes.
No.
He describes wonderfully the mad dance of capitalist dynamics, which only reached its peak today, more than a century and a half later.
So he was wrong on the timescale.
Okay, first thing he was wrong on.
But Gerald A. Cohen enumerated the four features of classic Marxist notion of the working class.
One, it constitutes the majority of society.
Well, he was wrong then.
Two, it produces the wealth of society.
Again, he was wrong.
Three, it consists of the exploited members of society.
That would be the one that I'd be most likely to agree on, but I won't because I'll tell you in a minute.
And four, it's members of the needy people in society.
Well, I can agree on that.
The working class probably are the most needy people in a capitalist society.
Of course, the things that they need aren't food, which was the problem in the Soviet Union, or consumer goods, of which they apparently have plenty.
The problem is that they need exercise, dieting tips, vacations, things like that.
When these four features are combined, they generate two further features.
Five, the working class has nothing to lose from the revolution, well, they certainly do have a lot to lose.
And six, it can and will engage in revolutionary transformation of society.
Okay, Slavoy, tell us why Marx was wrong.
None of the first four features apply to today's working class, which is why features five and six cannot be generated.
Okay, so Marx was categorically wrong, by your own admission, but for some reason you entitled this, Marx was often right in a much more literal way than he intended.
But a literal reading of Marx's predictions show him to be demonstrably wrong, and even you can see it.
Marx was not simply wrong, he was often right, but more literally than he himself expected to be.
Except not literally, you mean metaphorically.
For example, Marx couldn't have imagined that the capitalist dynamics of dissolving all particular identities would translate into ethnic identities as well.
Is that really the capitalists doing that?
Or is that the postmodernists attacking all identities, as well as ethnic identities?
For example, is it the capitalists who are saying, but what is it to be British?
What does British really mean?
Can I be a Muslim atheist?
Seriously, is this the capitalists doing this?
I can't help but feel that the capitalists would be just fine with ethnic identities if they could monetize them, for example, in little flags that one might wave at a free speech parade, which is exactly what I did today.
Today's celebration of minorities and marginals is the predominant majority position.
Oh yeah, that's what the capitalists are well into.
Going, by the way, do we have representation?
That's the capitalist position.
It's not the far-left neo-Marxist socialist position or anything.
It's the conservative party that's constantly banging the drum about representation of minorities.
It's not the Labour Party.
They're like, dude, we don't care about that.
We're the unwashed mass of the proletariat.
But anyway, the alt-rightists who complain about the terror of quote-unquote political correctness.
You mean the term that emerged from the Soviet Union and has taken control of the West and is promoted by far-left people who are often Marxists and in this fucking article, you have a citation of John McDonnell.
But anyway, it's only alt-rightists who give a damn about political correctness.
It's not like there could be a sensible liberal centre majority that might also be concerned with it or anything like that.
But they're trying to take advantage of this by presenting themselves as protectors of an endangered minority, attempting to mirror campaigns on the other side.
Are they really?
I think they view themselves as the protectors of the majority of the country.
Because believe it or not, in Europe at least, the majority of the countries are still white.
He then gives us a joke about a man who is convinced he's a grain of wheat.
And when he's cured, he still refuses to leave the hospital because he says to the doctor, I know that I'm not a grain of wheat, but does the chicken know it?
Another hilariously nostalgic Soviet joke.
Specifically about commodity fetishism.
Our belief that commodities are magic objects, endowed with an inherent metaphysical power.
I don't know who believes this.
And this is not located in our mind in the way that we misperceive reality, but in our social reality itself.
We may know the truth, but if we act as if we don't know it, in our real life, we act like the chicken from the joke.
Yes, that's Marx being more right than he literally intended, I'm sure.
Because this is how ideology works in our cynical era.
We don't have to believe in it.
Apparently.
I mean, it's not like everyone actually does believe in their ideologies, and I genuinely think they do.
But he thinks that nobody takes democracy or justice seriously.
Well, nobody on the left, I guess.
We are all aware of their corruption, but we practice them.
In other words, we display our belief in them because we assume they work even if we do not believe in them.
No, it's because they don't have to be perfect to work.
It's better to have an imperfect democracy or system of justice than none at all.
Surely as someone who lived in the Soviet Union, you would know that.
Well, I suppose you'd know that if you didn't have such a nostalgic hard-on for it.
I do not really believe in it.
It's just part of my culture seems to be the predominant mode of the displaced belief.
Dude, you are talking about the Muslim atheists, alright?
You're not talking about the sort of cultural and national identities that people do still genuinely believe in.
Culture is the name for all those things we practice without really believing them.
I disagree.
Without taking them quite seriously.
I disagree.
This is why we dismiss fundamentalist believers as barbarians or primitives, as anti-cultural as a threat to culture.
They dare to take seriously their beliefs.
Well, this is the thing.
I think this really explains the rising tide of nationalism.
There is a certain kind of bourgeois, middle-class, highly educated, privileged socialist who don't take their cultural beliefs seriously.
And this is one of the reasons they hate kind of bourgeois class traitors like myself and the working classes, who do take their cultural beliefs seriously.
How dare you take your beliefs seriously?
Well, I'm so sorry, but I do.
And somehow, this is all proof that Marxist theories are not simply alive.
Marx is a ghost that continues to haunt us, and the only way to keep him alive is to focus on those of his insights which are today more true than in his own time.
Sarvoy, Jordan Peterson was right, where you are really phoning this in.
What?
Are you getting old and lazy or something?
You're really not trying very hard anymore.
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