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I joined The Daily Shoah Death Panel for a wide-ranging discussion on Leo Strauss, liberalism, and Khantrived Khan Khantroversy, and much more. To listen, click here.
For more background on Strauss, see:
- Greg Johnson, “Strauss on Persecution and the Art of Writing“
- Greg Johnson, “Leo Strauss, the Conservative Revolution, and National Socialism,” Part 1, Part 2, Part 3
- Greg Johnson, “Paul Gottfried’s Leo Strauss and American Conservatism“
- Ricardo Duchesne, “The Straussian Assault on America’s European Heritage“
I want to thank Mike Enoch and Seventh Son for having me back. You guys are the best.
Greg Johnson
3 Comments
That was one of the best segments I’ve heard on the Shoah. Great job, Greg.
I enjoy your discussions Greg and with the folks at the Daily Shoah, it’s always a great pairing.
In particular I found your talk on the seldom mentioned Leo Strauss influence on the Neo Cohens very interesting, I’m eager to look at your related articles.
Keep up the great work.
Greg, some thoughts on the program:
RE Objectivists and “barnyard collectivism”: Has any Objectivist ever confronted the NAACP, La Raza, Black Lives Matter, the Muslim Student Union or the various university ethnic studies departments and told them their race based advocacies are: “… a doctrine of, by and for brutes. It is a barnyard or stock-farm version of collectivism … Like every form of determinism, [racial advocacy] invalidates the specific attribute which distinguishes man from all other living species: his rational faculty. [Racial advocacy] negates two aspects of man’s life: reason and choice, or mind and morality” [–via various Randian lexicons].
What would happen when our interlocutor demands that the various non-White racialist groups end their support for affirmative action, or drop their solidarity with third world invaders, or retract their demands for reparations for slavery…or perhaps just cut back on the post-Ferguson rioting?
Of course, we don’t see this happen. We do see quite a lot of finger wagging at White people who advocate for their own ethnic interests. But when it comes to non-Whites…crickets. Given that many AltRight activists appear to have gotten their start with Objectivism, perhaps someone could write a Randian style novel where the White hero uses these arguments against non-whites.
RE liberals not suffering the consequences of their actions: this is something that gets me. I have known liberals in America who opposed apartheid in South Africa. But those same liberals do not have to live under ANC black majority rule with its militant criminal attacks and open discrimination against Whites. Nor have European liberals who opposed White rule in Algeria, Congo or Angola had to flee their homes with the victory of terrorist “liberation” regimes.
Liberals are very good at throwing other White people to the wolves in order to pursue their own course of moralistic signaling, I’ve questioned liberals about this, but they do not see the disconnect between, say, their living in mostly White communities yet pushing for open borders. They do not have to put up with the crime and dysfunction of a Detroit, the anarchy of the southwestern USA border regions, or the turning of California’s central valley into the third world.
There may be some karmic payback coming in with the current invasion of Europe. How many Europeans assaulted by refugees/terrorists at Cologne, Paris or Brussels were in prior years anti-apartheid demonstrators? Or had sent aid to the Marxist insurgents in Rhodesia or Southwest Africa? How many Europeans who have had their cars burned by third world rioters from Malmo to London once looked down their noses disdainfully at George Wallace or Ian Smith? Are these White liberals perhaps learning their lessons? Or will they remain deluded by ideology?
Yes, there is an element of shadenfreude here, though of course the dilemma is in liberals dragging down the rest of us with their delusions.
RE the rat race: White people have built incredible cities (right out of the Randian ideal) yet they are becoming increasingly unlivable. Back in the 1990s leftists frequently critiqued globalism because it was turning the USA into a third world country (via accelerated class division, the de-industrialization of the cities, the growth of the prison-industrial complex). The irony is that the left has since become a primary agent in this third worldization via their advocacy of open borders. North America and Europe are to be literally turned into the third world by importation of non-White populations.
This is one reason no one is happy. Life is becoming increasingly empty because there is no real future in being reduced to an atomized individual, consuming and producing in the face of a distant ruling global oligarchy. There’s no vision of a better future, so why have children? There’s just 500 channels of telescreen, online shopping, and an eternal war with Eurasia or Eastasia. The kind of issues which White people ought to be discussing (like a free market versus social democracy) are being pushed aside as politics become racial competition, open in the case of non-Whites, disguised or dropped for Whites. And Whites can not, pace Strauss, identify the ultimate issue which is race.
It gets back to that lack of leadership. I think one reason for the continuing obsession with World War II is that it was an era of great leaders – Hitler, Stalin, FDR, Churchill, De Gaulle are all names which resonate into the 21st century. Great leaders crystallize the desires of a people, and perhaps this is a reason that there are conspicuous by their absence today … the system wants mediocrities who will keep the citizenry from thinking big. And this is why Donald Trump has created quite a stir. With some applied leadership, Trump has mobilized a sizable sector of the citizenry and panicked the system.
We shall see how this plays out.