George Bernard Shaw was not a communist, but a socialist and, not so strangely, he admired, we have been told, Stalin, but we don’t why he also liked Mussolini. Did GBS know Marinetti? We need to take a cold bath and try to see why… 

GBS was not an imbecile and he was very sharp at exposing the way bourgeois behaved in the West. He is often referred to as the second major playwright in England after Shakespeare, though he was born in Ireland of old British protestant stock. Not an Irish “republican”, he often sharpened his wit towards England for badly treating Ireland. 

He would have been astute enough to see that the hidden cost to achieve a lovely Western bourgeois peace was based on sweet social lies and a ruthless colonialism. After the Wall Street crash of 1929, everyone was preparing for biffo, and there was some unsavoury jockeying to minimise the damage. The Axis power was being concocted between Germany, Italy and Japan at first. Russia was aware of being a large piece of meat in the sandwich, having already fought Japan and Europe, a few times — and the Ottoman empire (Turkey) in Crimea.

Our Western world thus chastised Mussolini for aligning himself and his Italian government with Hitler. Meanwhile Stalin, as recently as yesterday, "has been blamed” for WW2, by making an agreement with Hitler in regard to Poland or such. This is bullshit of course, The starting dynamics of WW2 were anchored on dubious agreements that Hitler made with England and France. And no matter what Chamberlain's paper had been signed, summer of 1939 was going to be it. 

In September 1923, Mussolini offered German Chancellor Gustav Stresemann a common foreign policy. Mussolini sought German military support against potential French military intervention over Italy's diplomatic dispute with Yugoslavia over the Fiume territory, should an Italian seizure of Fiume result in a war between Italy and Yugoslavia. In 1924, the German ambassador to Italy said that Mussolini saw a nationalist Germany as an essential ally for Italy against France, and hoped to tap into the German army and political desire for a war of revenge against France. Italy thought the year 1935 was a crucial date for preparing for a war against France, as it was the year when Germany's obligations under the Treaty of Versailles were expiring. As well, Western colonialism was very important, hence the ensuing WW2 battles in North Africa, Libya, etc. 

The middle East still bears the scars of this post WW2 colonial history, now taken over by the Yanks with battles using proxies, to do regime change and so forth. The Russians have sort of meddled in these little US games to bring in some "annoying” peace, though the Yanks are still thieving the oil in Syria.

One thing to realise is that from Berlin to Moscow, the land is mostly flat, with only a few large rivers to cross. Napoleon even tried to invade Russia in his dream of a “unified  Europe”. Arriving too late, his campaign having been delayed a couple of months by some domestic affairs, on 7 September the French caught up with the Russian Army, which had dug itself in on hillsides before the small town of Borodino, seventy miles west of Moscow. The following Battle of Borodino, the bloodiest single-day action of the Napoleonic Wars, with 72,000 casualties, resulted in a narrow French victory. The Russian Army withdrew the following day, leaving the French again without a decisive victory. A week later, Napoleon entered Moscow, only to find it abandoned. The city was soon ablaze, the French blaming Russian arsonists but we all know (we should) that this is a tactic of war.


The capture of Moscow did not force Alexander I to sign a peace treaty. Napoleon stayed in Moscow for a month, waiting for a surrender offer that never came. On 19 October 1812 Napoleon and his army left Moscow and marched toward Kaluga, where Field Marshal Mikhail Kutuzov was encamped with the Russian Army. After the inconclusive Battle of Maloyaroslavets, Napoleon began to retreat back to the Polish border. 

In the following weeks, Napoleon's Grande Armée suffered from the onset of the Russian Winter. Lack of food and fodder for the horses, hypothermia from the bitter cold and persistent guerrilla warfare from Russian peasants and Cossacks led to great losses in men, and a breakdown of discipline and cohesion in the Grande Armée. 

More fighting followed at the Battle of Vyazma and the Battle of Krasnoi which resulted in further losses for the French. When Napoleon's army crossed the Berezina River in late November, only 27,000 soldiers remained; his Grande Armée had lost about 380,000 men while 100,000 had been captured. Napoleon had to retreat like a glorious frozen rat.

Hitler decided to start Unternehmen Barbarossa, the name for the Axis invasion of the Soviet Union, much earlier in the year than Napoleon — Sunday, 22 June 1941 — but his armies got stuck in front of Stalingrad (23 August 1942 to 2 February 1943). The city did not fall despite heavy losses on both sides. The Volga river making a natural moat, the city was also defended with fanatical courage, despite the Russian army being under-equipped and outnumbered.

On 10 November 1961, Nikita Khrushchev's administration changed the name of this glorious city back to Volgograd (so named from 1589 till 1925) as part of his programme of de-Stalinisation following Stalin's death, to reduce the "cult of personality". This action was controversial, because Stalingrad had been a symbol of resistance during World War II for Russia.

Khrushchev was born in 1894 in the village of Kalinovka, close to the present-day border between Russia and Ukraine. A metal worker during his youth, he became a political commissar during the 1917 Russian Civil War. He worked his way up the Soviet hierarchy. He supported Joseph Stalin's purges, and approved thousands of arrests. In 1938, Stalin sent him to govern the Ukrainian SSR, and he continued the purges there. 

During the Great Patriotic War (Eastern Front, WW2), Khrushchev served as an intermediary between Stalin and his generals. Khrushchev was present at the defense of Stalingrad, a fact he took great pride in. After the war, he returned to Ukraine before being recalled to Moscow as one of Stalin's close advisers.

The 1954 transfer of the Crimean Oblast to Ukraine has often been described as a "symbolic gesture", marking the 300th anniversary of Ukraine becoming a part of the Tsardom of Russia. That "symbolic gesture" came out as a post factum, never discussed as one of the reasons prior to the transfer, which was attributed to Nikita Khrushchev, though the person who signed the document was Kliment Voroshilov.

But one has to remember that some Ukrainians NEVER liked the USSR, even before the Stalinist purges, and many joined the German troops against Russia during WW2 — and that there are still Nazis in Ukraine. When Ukraine decided to fall into the hands of the West (remember Obama and Biden, the funding the “Nazi” groups who supported the regime of Poroshenko), Russia (Putin) decided to take back Crimea as a Russian Oblast. There was a referendum, a quick political action, the building of a new bridge between Russia and Crimea and a special note reminding people that the gifting of Crimea to Ukraine had been unconstitutional under Russian law. So there.

So, apart from Crimea, the Russian war history which is still making the clocks tick, was a great part of George Bernard Shaw’s life. He died in 1950, age 94, with all his marbles. 

Hey, we still “remember” wars in the same way the Russian do. We just have had our own ANZAC celebrations — in isolation due a new yoke (not a joke, is it?), the coronavirus. 

To celebrate the end of WW2,Russia has thus just built one of the largest Orthodox Church with depiction of its heroes. We need to investigate:

Russia is planning to open a huge cathedral with mosaics depicting Vladimir Putin and Joseph Stalin, as well as the annexation of Crimea, on the 75th anniversary of the defeat of Nazi Germany next month.

The mammoth structure will be one of the world’s tallest Orthodox cathedrals when it opens in the military’s Patriot Park outside Moscow on 9 May.


Largely, the Resurrection of Christ Cathedral is a monument to the Soviet victory in the second world war. The diameter of the drum under the main cupola will measure 19.45 metres to signify the year the war ended, and a “road of memory” will have 1,418 steps, corresponding to the number of days the Soviet Union fought in the war. Its main steps are reportedly forged from metal salvaged from Nazi military hardware.

But special attention has been paid to several eye-catching mosaics that glorify Putin and other Russian officials during the annexation of Crimea in 2014, an operation led by unmarked Russian army units referred to as “little green men”.

Read more:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/27/giant-new-russian-cathedra...

On this site we do not shame by suggesting that without Russia on the side of the allies, WW2 would have lasted quite longer — or until Hitler or the Yanks used an atom bomb in Europe, like the Americans did on Japan.

On the Crimean front we are told from a biased Western perspective ad nauseam:

There was confusion about the status of Sevastopol and whether it was a part of the transfer as it had a degree of independence from the Crimean Oblast and never formally ratified the transfer, although it was later mentioned as Ukrainian territory in the Soviet Constitution and the Belavezha Accordsbetween Ukraine and Russia.


In 1994, a Russian nationalist administration under Yuriy Meshkov took over in Crimea with the promise to return Crimea to Russia, although these plans were later shelved.


After the overthrow of President Victor Yanukovych during the 2014 Ukrainian revolution [financed by the USA, Obama, Biden, Nuland], the territories of Sevastopol and Crimea were seized by the Russian Federation; 
The annexation was formalized following an unconstitutional referendum in which 96% of the Crimean population purportedly voted "Yes." This move was denounced by the new Ukrainian government and disregarded by most UN states, which continue to recognize Crimea as part of Ukraine. The Venice Commission (an advisory body of the Council of Europe in the field of constitutional law) issued an opinion in 2014, concluding that the referendum was illegal under the Ukrainian constitution and that "circumstances in Crimea did not allow the holding of a referendum in line with European democratic standards. 

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1954_transfer_of_Crimea

Of course this Western view is bullshit. Russia did honourably what it had to do on this issue, considering that most of Crimeans are Russians — and we have to remember the West did not adhere to the verbal agreement of no Western push into the former USSR countries, made between Reagan and Gorbachev, thus worth the paper it was not printed upon. 

Oh... we’ve gone a long way away from George Bernard Shaw. 

"Capitalism has destroyed our belief in any effective power but that of self interest backed by force."

This was GBS view of his cultural environment at the time. We often remember him as an old frail man… and we forget he had been a young vigorous man before…



Failing as a novelist, Shaw created himself in the 1880s. He became a vegetarian, a socialist, a powerful orator, a polemicist, and tried his hand at playwriting. He became an inspiration in the Fabian Society — a middle-class socialist group that vied for the transformation of the English society through “permeation” of the country’s intellectual and political life. Shaw became editor of one of the classics of British socialism, Fabian Essays in Socialism (1889), to which he contributed two major sections.


In 1885, Shaw found some journalistic work — book reviews in the Pall Mall Gazette (1885–88), became art critic for The World and musical columnist in the Star (writing under the name "Corno di Bassetto") from 1888 to 1890.

His mother, Bessie, had a fine mezzo-soprano voice and was much influenced by a lodger, George John Lee, who was a vocal music teacher. The Shaws' house thus had often filled with music, with frequent gatherings of singers and players. For whatever reason, Shaw believed that Lee was his natural father. When his mother moved to England to shack up with Lee, George followed them soon after. His “official" dad was a compete failure and an alcoholic... 

Thus George had a good understanding of the moires of life and of music, particularly opera. after a stint at writing columns for The World (as “G.B.S.”) from 1890 to 1894, Shaw wrote for the Saturday Review as a theatre critic (1895–98). He used all his wit as a polemicist to attack the hypocrisies of the Victorian theatres. He began writing his own plays.

The times he was living in were very different from those of Shakespeare. Less kingly-angst and more social argy-bargy. The Industrial Revolution had displaced people and reset the parameters of the sub-class of people from peasants to miners for coal. Bourgeois meanwhile created themselves by deviously bracketing their envy. George Bernard Shaw exposed this clearly.

More to come

Casual work, unions and contract work...
Einstein



GL.

During this Covid19 crisis, the “market” of ruthless capitalism has had to make room for socialist ideas of supporting the stay-at-home, the unemployed, and the "employed with no job to go to”. 

Even Ultra-CONservative governments had to come to term with a form of living wage. For years they had hammered the welfare recipients with work-for-the-dole, and made the unemployed go through hoops before getting a pittance. Now with "no job to go to" and compulsory isolation, and with the bourgeois class joining the queues at Centrelink, the Scomo government had to adopt rather quickly the Labor solutions to the problem, as written to Scott Morrison by Albo as early as late December 2019. Is the Scomo government going far enough? There are still a lot of people that have been forgotten in the scheme. Mostly casuals and people on contracts — a displaced large part of the workforce cultivated by CONservative government in order to minimise unionism. The concept of living wage is not new. In recent times, it was first mooted in the 18th century by Thomas Paine.

In America, the present health system being private, it found it difficult to deal with a national crisis, as decreed by the world health authorities, of isolation and distancing in order to minimise the number of deaths and prevent the hospitals from being swamped. Even in France the proud national public system — which was slowly being dismantled by the Macron government to suit a more economically minded European government — was barely coping.

At this stage, the problem is to balance death by Covid19 versus the destruction of the social settings — a destruction which can lead to more deaths. Keep calm and don’t worry… Is there a better way to deal with Covid19? Yes, but it would have to be targeted to social groups and boat loads of oldies on cruise ships...

The times George Bernard Shaw was living in were very different from those of Shakespeare or even from Sir Walter Scott’s. The Industrial Revolution had displaced people and reset the parameters of the sub-classes from peasants to miners for coal and other stuff. There was less grandiose kingly-angst and more sociable argy-bargy from shopkeepers and petty scrooges in the English society that made Dickens famous as well as his vigorous campaign for children's rights, education, and other social reforms.

 

 

In France and possibly Germany, the social structure was going to and fro between a form of pure socialism and conservative bourgeois socialism, while in France, the “church" got squarely dumped. Laicity and secularity were the ingredients of government, even if some people chose to go to church. Unions were powerful. Workers had rights. Marxism had to be considered for improving the working conditions. And of course, there is the “market” of who buys what. The government would buy stuff like defence and administrative skills, the bourgeois would buy comforts, everyone had to buy food. Happiness had to be based on the main bourgeois ideals, as stated by JJ Rousseau: good health, enough money, good relationships… JJ was not good at any of this himself but this is beside the point. His ideas stirred the poor populace that had enough of being enslaved and taken for mugs, into a revolution.

George Bernard Shaw himself was born (1854) before aeroplanes, in the days of horse and carts. Before he died, one major war between France and Germany, two massive world wars and several pandemics, a Wall Street crash plus massive technological advances, including the atom bomb, had happened. The shock of modernity, movies, new styles and social adjustments would have been either enthralling or annoying. 

The bourgeois survived well in general. They improved themselves by deviously bracketing their envy and bank accounts and sending others to war. George Bernard Shaw had exposed their petty affairs and machinations, but really it was like making mirrors for the bourgeois to laugh at the bourgeois next door, not themselves. It was mostly the bourgeois who bought the tickets to his plays.

Meanwhile the main operators, the super rich class — different from the Lords and the Royals — were psychopathically managing the whole system from behind the stage, making sure the illusions and pomp of the Royal family acted like a voodoo spell on the masses. The media was playing and still plays its part. Few writers dared to challenge. It’s the same about the present coronavirus situation. Without a system of privileges that is presented and sustained by the media as a god-given and necessary scale, the system could fall prey to socialism. This is the next stage as mentioned by Slavoj Zizek… Meanwhile the science is behind the eighth ball, as is it trying to do catch up and prevent the dissemination of “fake news”, while health expert themselves are doing “officials” trials, while others less official doctors with ideas that are not “approved" are doing lateral experiments with “less comparative studies” but saving lives nonetheless. Statistics are becoming a battleground for truth...

For example, quantum cryptography expert Danny Rogers, Ph.D., is working hard to fight COVID-19 disinformation and fake trends that are emerging from the internet. A co-founder on the Global Disinformation Index (GDI), he studies the dissemination of misinformation, including what is it, where is it coming from, and why. Designed to disrupt, defund and down-rank disinformation sites, the GDI was formed as people increasingly became concerned about the 2016 US elections fake news.

But what is fake news? That the royals have the rights to be royals? That Trump was sleeping with Putin or the reverse? That Hillary was fiddling with her emails? That the FBI used unsavoury tricks to frame people?




In England, the privileged class fought against the Enlightenment. It was a struggle to get some philosophical value out of ideas and sciences, despite the Darwin family and their evolution theory which would have annoyed the top monkeys. 

There were some exception in regard to enlightened atheism in England, though, but quite late in terms of European Enlightenment.

George Holyoake coined the word secularism in 1851. It offered the English-speaking world the clarification of the movement for separation of religion and state which had been the hallmark of the Enlightenment. Remember, Diderot, way before the French revolution, had been a fierce advocate to remove kings and priests from society. 

The Leicester Secular Society was founded in 1851. 

The National Secular Society was founded in 1866 by politician Charles Bradlaugh, spearheading advocacy for freeing citizens from government requirements of religious observances. Bradlaugh's 1880 election to Parliament brought on a long dispute over the right to affirm declarations of office rather than swear oaths, as he was denied his seat for five years with resolutions preventing him from swearing an oath. 

When Bradlaugh was ultimately admitted in 1886, he took up the issue and saw the Oaths Act 1888 passed, which confirmed the right to optionally affirm declarations for inaugurations to office and offering testimony to government bodies.


In 1881, The Freethinker began circulation as Britain's longest-running humanist periodical. In 1891, the Union of Ethical Societies was formed in the United Kingdom by Stanton Coit, an American, as a union of British Ethical movement societies. This group became known as the Ethical Union and the British Humanist Association. In 1899, the Rational Press Association was formed by a group of free-thinkers including Charles Albert Watts and George Holyoake.

The Freethinker is a British secular humanist magazine, founded by G.W. Foote in 1881. One of the world's oldest surviving free-thought publications, it moved to online only, in 2014.

The Freethinker is unapologetically atheist and anti-religious. In Issue 1 (May, 1881), Foote set out The Freethinker's purpose:


The Freethinker is an anti-Christian organ, and must therefore be chiefly aggressive. It will wage relentless war against superstition in general, and against Christian superstition in particular. It will do its best to employ the resources of Science, Scholarship, Philosophy and Ethics against the claims of the Bible as a Divine Revelation; and it will not scruple to employ for the same purpose any weapons of ridicule or sarcasm that may be borrowed from the armoury of Common Sense.


Although closely linked with the National Secular Society for most of its history, The Freethinker is autonomous and is not published by the NSS.


In 2006, the magazine's front-page masthead was changed from "Secular humanist monthly" to "The Voice of Atheism since 1881”.


Barry Duke is the current editor:
-----------------

"Until you let go of God and take hold of yourselves, of the innate powers of your own beings, there is no hope for you . . . stop praying and go to work.”
— Lois Waisbrooker, c. 1896.


It’s simple logic. The Christian god promises to answer prayer. Prayers to this god are not answered. Therefore, the Christian god does not exist.

Right now, millions of Christians are asking their god to defeat the coronavirus and to heal the sick. Those prayers are having no effect.


It is not just the coronavirus, of course. We could take the example of the horrific 1755 Lisbon earthquake that Voltaire called a “repellant dance of death” and which 19th-century orator Robert Ingersoll concluded had “denied the existence of God.” Or the 1918 “Spanish flu,” which killed my great-grandfather. Or the 2001 terrorist attacks that prompted Richard Dawkins to say: “My respect for the Abrahamic religions went up in the smoke and choking dust of September 11th.”


History is pockmarked with examples, but we only need one. SARS-CoV-2 is virulent enough to single-handedly kill the Christian god.

-----------------------

Born 1737, in Thetford, English county of Norfolk, Thomas Paine migrated to the British American colonies in 1774 with the help of Benjamin Franklin, arriving in time to participate in the American Revolution. Every (nearly) rebel read or listened to a reading of his pamphlet Common Sense (1776) which catalysed the rebellious demand for independence from Great Britain. The American Crisis was Paine's pro-revolutionary pamphlet series. 

Common Sense was so influential that John Adams said: "Without the pen of the author of Common Sense, the sword of Washington would have been raised in vain”. 

Paine wrote Rights of Man (1791), in part as a defense of the French Revolution against its (mostly British) critics. His attacks on Anglo-Irish conservative writer Edmund Burke led to a trial and conviction in absentia in England in 1792 for the crime of seditious libel.

Worried that the French Revolution could spread to England, William Pitt the Younger and his government suppressed works that encouraged radical philosophies. 

Paine advocated the right of the people to overthrow their government. A writ for Paine’s arrest was issued in early 1792. Paine fled to France in September where, despite speaking no French, he was elected to the French National Convention. The Girondists regarded him as an ally. The Montagnards, especially Maximilien Robespierre, regarded him as an enemy. As we should all known, The French revolution was a BLOODY divided affair, with more factions than a local Labor party branch...

In December 1793, Paine was arrested and was taken to the Luxembourg Prison in Paris. There, he continued to work on The Age of Reason (1793–1794). James Monroe, a future President of the United States, used his diplomatic connections to get Paine released in November 1794. The Age of Reason advocated (private) deism, while promoting reason and free thought. Paine argued against institutionalised religion in general and Christian doctrine in particular. He published the pamphlet Agrarian Justice (1797), discussing the origins of property and introduced the concept of a guaranteed minimum income through a one-time inheritance tax on landowners. In 1802, he returned to the US where he died on June 8, 1809, forgotten by all. Greed, god, guns were the new motivators of the great American inequality. Everything has a price. Slaves only got their freedom after the American Civil War.

In England, mass production of things, with workers re-tooled by the conservative bourgeois system into slaves, provided comfort improvements  but little philosophical change. This led to the “Arts and Craft” movement which was a euphemism for semi-industrialised decoration made in smaller quantities by "basket weavers". Against the perceived impoverishment of the decorative arts and the conditions in which they were produced, Arts and Crafts stood for traditional craftsmanship, using medieval, romantic and folk styles while advocating economic and social reform and was anti-industrial in its orientation. It had a limited influence on the arts in Europe until it was displaced by Modernism in the 1930s, when capitalism had to be relaunched on a grand scale after the 1929 crash of the stock market. We know the rest of history. The baby boomers (a new moniker for bourgeois) have been blamed for whatever. The bogans are forming the new wave of bourgeois with little intellectual value. Intellectualism never stood a chance.

We shall leave this essay to the view expressed in 1938 by the Marxists about George Bernard Shaw:

Shaw performed a useful function in exposing the weakness of the bourgeois class. He exposes the rottenness of its culture and at the same time commits the future to its hands, but neither he nor his readers can believe in the success of that; and so he represents symbolically bourgeois intelligence as it is to-day, shamefaced and losing confidence in itself. He plays this active part, that he is one of the forces of defeatism and despair which help the decay of a world that has had its day. This disintegration is no more than pathological without the active forces of revolution which can shatter the rotten structure and build it anew. This confidence Shaw has never achieved, nor the insight that is needed for it. He stands by the side of Wells, Lawrence, Proust, Huxley, Russell, Forster, Wassermann, Hemingway, and Galsworthy as typical of their age, men who proclaim the disillusionment of bourgeois culture with itself, men themselves disillusioned and yet not able to wish for anything better or gain any closer grasp of this bourgeois culture whose pursuit of liberty and individualism led men into the mire. Always it is their freedom they are defending. This makes them pathetic rather than tragic figures, for they are helpless, not because of overwhelming circumstances but because of their own illusion.



https://www.marxists.org/archive/caudwell/1938/studies/ch01.htm

As a traditionalist political movement, integralism emerged during the 19th and early 20th century within the Catholic Church, especially in France, mostly to combat the thrust of Enlightenment — the laicity and secularisation which became associated with modernism. Integralism also opposes ideas such as godless socialism and communism. Thus Integralism is in opposition to god-less free-thinking "modernism", by reshaping the liberal philosophy of secular modernity into Christian theology. Not a new technique used by the church to maintain the control over the flocks. The Catholic church has been doing his caper since its inception, including absorbing Santa Claus as St Nicolas… In America, a revival in Integralism has led to a rediscovered reactionary attitude, especially amongst the young Catholics… Here James M. Patterson explains:

"Integralism is an internet aesthetic of mostly young men alienated from the public life and consumed with the libido dominandi.” 

The term libido dominandi shows how sexual liberation was from its inception a form of control. Those who wished to liberate human from the moral order needed to impose social controls as soon as they succeeded, because "liberated libido leads to anarchy". Apart from the young men, we also need to remember the young Catholic women, now aged in their 30s, still waiting for Mr Right and still being virgins. Mr Right ain’t going to turn up.


James M. Patterson continues:

Over the past few years, Catholic integralism has gone from a curious fringe of the American Right to a subject of some interest among more mainstream conservative publications. American Affairs published Adrian Vermeule’s integralist critique of Patrick Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed, and First Things published Gladden Pappin’s review of Helen Rosenblatt’s The Lost History of Liberalism, as well as Fr. Romanus Cessario’s defense of the Vatican kidnapping of the Jewish boy, Edgardo Mortara, in his review of Mortara’s memoir. Other integralists, like Patrick Smith and Pater Edmund Waldstein, have published for First Things, with them and others appearing in The Plough, University Bookman, Church Life Journal, and other such publications. William Borman and Matthew Walther successfully raised funds to start The Lamp, which promises to be a kind of Triumph redivivus, although its release is presently delayed. Publications like Providence and The Chronicle of Higher Education have written pieces observing the return of integralism, with City Journal even publishing a full-page portrait of Vermeule. As writers, academics and, in Waldstein’s case, a Cistersian monk, they have been formed not by republican associations but by the top-down administration that defines religious and academic life. So formed, they revolt against the constant, low-level disorder typical of constitutional democracies. Rather than enter the fray to persuade citizens, they instead wish to put their citizens under the control of a Catholic administrative state that degrades free association of citizens into the solemn submission of subjects to their spiritual and temporal superiors.

 

With success comes criticism. My response, “Why Integralism Is an Ideology of Despair,” was published here and received some notice, but others have since addressed the arguments of integralism. Before my piece was the long debate at Public Discourse, there was an essay by Richard Reinsch in National Review. Soon after, I chaired a packed roundtable on the subject at the 2019 meeting of the American Political Science Association. In National Affairs, Robert P. George and Ryan T. Anderson defended liberalism in the same issue with Dan Burns. These pieces illustrated liberalism as a practice or as separate from the kinds of liberalism that the Church had condemned during the nineteenth century. Timothy Troutner in Church Life Journal observed that the ideological nature of integralism is merely the mirror image of the liberalism to which Waldstein responded, oddly, that regimes should be constructed in the same manner as monasteries. The most comprehensive and most damning is also the most recent, Michael Hanby’s recent contribution in First Things. Hanby, no friend of liberalism, found integralism to be part of “the mystical disaster of modernity that reduces Christianity from a mystique to a politique,” that is, one that degrades Catholic social teaching, ironically, into Hobbesian project.

https://lawliberty.org/after-republican-virtue/

Modernity mixed with catholic teachings leading to unrestrained, selfish, and uncivilised competition among adherents a Hobbesian cutthroat environment? Here comes the Jesuits to regulate these loose feet, with a tiered structure of obedience...

Someone, Ian Bothur, is not happy about James M. Patterson’s view…

 

The discourse around integralism has proven that it is easy to define but surprisingly difficult to understand, and even harder to swallow. Integralism is not so much “left” or “right” as it is definitively illiberal. It bewilders the liberal mind, which tends to misidentify it as one of the rival philosophies which were conceived in reaction to liberalism. Hence, the integralist will often find himself accused at once of being a fascist and a socialist, a public menace with fantastical and unattainable ideals. 

Integralism, its critics say, is impossible to sell to the masses; and thankfully so, because it would destroy democracy. Such incoherence is due, no doubt, to the incoherence of the liberal mind. Fortunately, man is not born a liberal, but becomes one. Today, it is more likely that the unformed common mind is more receptive to truth than the malformed intellectual, and integralism would not seem nearly as bizarre as most people might suppose.

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/a-workingmans-case-for-...

Integralism is a complete conflict of interest and beliefs:

 

In politics, integralism or integrism (French: intégrisme) is the set of theoretical concepts and practical policies that advocate a fully integrated social and political order, based on converging patrimonial (inherited) political, cultural, religious, and national traditions of a particular state, or some other political entity. Some forms of integralism are focused on achieving political and social integration, and also national or ethnic unity, while others were more focused on achieving religious and cultural uniformity. In the political and social history of the 19th and 20th centuries, integralism was often related to traditionalist conservatism and similar political movements on the right wing of a political spectrum, but it was also adopted by various centrist movements as a tool of political, national and cultural integration.

 

 It has become a way for the religious mob, especially the Catholics, to adapt to “modernity”. It does not wash. Noah’s Ark is still a fantasy. Indulging in Integralism is just a way for them to salvage the furniture that is on fire. The Islamics are quite worried that they will have to go the same path and they tighten freedoms of thoughts as much as possible, but for how long. It could take a couple of clever thinkers from within to dismantle the horrible Sharia law…

 

We shall see...