13 May 2018

Socialist Quotes for Sunday Reflection pt 10


"We should educate all Party members and other working people to become genuine patriots who first love their parents, spouses and children and further sincerely shed sweat and dedicate their all to spruce up their homes, villages and workplaces so that they are better than others' and add radiance to their country, their motherland."
- Kim Jong Un

........................

A Situationist critique of the decadence of the Mai 68 students:

“The millions of human beings who were shot, tortured, starved, treated like animals and made the object of a conspiracy of ridicule, can sleep in peace in their communal graves, for at least the struggle in which they died has enabled their descendants, isolated in their air-conditioned apartments, to believe, on the strength of their daily dose of television, that they are happy and free. The Communards went down, fighting to the last, so that you too could qualify for a Caribbean cruise.”
― Raoul Vaneigem

The sociologist Jacques Julliard made a very deep observation on this subject by underlining that the militants of Mai 68, when they denounced traditional values, “did not know that these values (honor, solidarity, heroism) were, by definition, the same as those of socialism, and that by terminating them, they opened the way to the triumph of bourgeois values: individualism, rational calculation, efficiency.”
- Alain de Benoist

....................

[Jalal Al-e-Ahmad, one of the inspirations of the Islamic revolution inf Iran, and who compared his task to that of Ernst Jünger]

"The important point is that we the people of the developing nations are not fabricating the machines. But, owing to economic and political determinants and to the global confrontation of rich and poor, we have had to be gentle and tractable consumers for the West's industrial goods or at best contented assemblers at low wages of what comes from the West. And this has necessitated our conforming ourselves, our governments, our cultures, and our daily lives to the machine. All we are we have had to conform to the measure of the machine. The one who created the machine has grown accustomed to this new god, its heaven and hell, over the course of two or three hundred years' gradual transformation. But what of the Kuwaiti who became acquainted with the machine only yesterday, or the Congolese, or myself as an Iranian ? How are we to vault over this three-hundred-year historical gap ?

We have been unable to preserve our own historicocultural character in the face of the machine and its fateful onslaught. Rather, we have been routed. We have been unable to take a considered stand in the face of this contemporary monster. So long as we do not comprehend the real essence, basis, and philosophy of Western civilization, only aping the West outwardly and formally (by consuming its machines), we shall be like the ass going about in a lion's skin. We know what became of him. Although the one who created the machine now cries out that it is stifling him, we not only fail to repudiate our assuming the garb of machine tenders, we pride ourselves on it. For two hundred years we have resembled the crow mimicking the partridge (always supposing that the West is a partridge and we are a crow). So long as we remain consumers, so long as we have not built the machine, we remain occidentotic. Our dilemma is that once we have built the machine, we will have become mechanotic, just like the West, crying out at the way technology and the machine have stampeded out of control."
- Jalal Al-e Ahmad, "Occidentosis: A Plague From the West", 1962, pp. 30-31

.................

No comments: