[P2P-F] Reflections on Trump, and the role of the commons as an alternative (Holy Mountain)

Sat Feb 11 17:48:49 CET 2017

The public debate is being shifted to the right in Europe and the US. The
debate is no longer between conservative and liberal. The terms of debate
are being framed by the anti-democratic ideas of the extreme right against
democratic conservative/liberals.
Few are equipped to recognise that there are fundamental philosophical
issues at the heart of all this.

Consider these three sites as representing only a small sample who have had
a huge boosts doubling or tripling their readership over the past year.

http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/breitbart.com (Popular so called alt-light)
http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/infowars.com (Conspiratorial)
http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/stormfront.org (Nazi)

Consider the growth rate of 600% since 2012 and that was only up to
September 2016 so it does not factor in the recent surge of interest in
this kind of material that the above site statistics suggest - Berger's
research compares the recruitment strategies of Isis and Nazi's on social
media. Where there has been significant efforts made to curb Isis online
when it comes to Nazi's things get legally tricky, have you heard Alt-Right
cry 'Free Speech' lately?, so they don't face the same barriers to
recruitment. Bergers prediction is that we are in for a very rough ten
years as the democratic core of liberal democracies, government and media
are not equipped for this. Those who shout loudest set the debate. My take
is that mainstream politicians have assumed liberalism as a given
particularly since 1989 and that makes them more like bureaucrats, they do
not have a deep understanding of ideology and so they don't recognise it
when it's staring them in the face. It is in this sense that I believe they
are ill equipped.

Bergers Report -

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/white-nationalist-movement-twitter-faster-growth-isis-islamic-state-study-a7223671.html

Bergers Lecture

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=65YJmfRbbPw

Nafeez Ahmed has done some excellent reporting on the growing influence of
far right networks in Europe and the US

https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/how-jo-coxs-killer-and-donald-trump-were-radicalised-by-a-global-web-of-nazi-power-cdba54aa1353#.juqha54s5

https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/how-the-trump-regime-was-manufactured-by-a-war-inside-the-deep-state-f9e757071c70#.rdo15x757

On 11 February 2017 at 08:25, Michel Bauwens <michel at p2pfoundation.net>
wrote:

> https://georgelakoff.com/2016/11/22/a-minority-president-
> why-the-polls-failed-and-what-the-majority-can-do/
>
> dear Kevin, see also the analysis by george lakoff,
>
> Michel
>
> 1. Re: Reflections on Trump, and the role of the commons as an
>>       alternative (Holy Mountain)
>>
>>
>> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>> Message: 1
>> Date: Fri, 10 Feb 2017 16:07:01 +0000
>> From: Holy Mountain <kev.flanagan at gmail.com>
>> To: P2P Foundation mailing list <p2p-foundation at lists.ourproject.org>
>> Cc: "staccotroncoso at p2pfoundation.net"
>>         <staccotroncoso at p2pfoundation.net>, Ann Marie Utratel
>>         <amu444 at gmail.com>, George Pór <george.por at gmail.com>
>> Subject: Re: [P2P-F] Reflections on Trump,      and the role of the
>> commons
>>         as an alternative
>> Message-ID:
>>         <CACpSwUf_wDFoxy9CEL9NuaqZyyo7eQhvQU0MhX1UGmCDA1TMMg at mail.
>> gmail.com>
>> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
>>
>> Hello Michel,
>>
>> We had a visiting lecturer Douglas Holmes a few weeks ago who wrote a book
>> called Fast Capitalism which examined the rise of the far right in Europe
>> throughout the 1990's he interviewed Le Pen for example. He said something
>> along these lines, at least as I interpreted, that people tend to see the
>> far right as something in the past something we have moved on from, but
>> what is misunderstood is that the emergence of fascism was in some ways
>> inseparable from the emergence of Liberalism and Socialism, it is part and
>> parcel of modernity, the elements that fascists draw on and
>> instrumentalise
>> for their reactionary anti-democratic cause are everywhere part of the
>> make
>> up of the modern world. In a broad cultural sense we are still
>> collectively
>> working through, both unconsciously and consciously, the enlightenment and
>> counter enlightenment. Listening to the lectures of liberal political
>> philosopher Isaiah Berlin, he presents a strong argument in support of
>> this. The struggle between the forces of the enlightenment and
>> counter-enlightenment were incredibly productive, in the progressive sense
>> in that it opened up great scope for debate and exploration of what it
>> means to be human in the modern world, giving birth to so much art and the
>> social sciences, but those same tendencies, the importance of culture vs
>> nature also gives birth to the comparison of cultures, the ranking of
>> cultures, the privileging of cultures, the sanctity of culture. We rush to
>> the defence of those marginalised by the rough reductionist mechanics of
>> 'western civilisation' but the claim of the extreme right is that the same
>> respect be afforded to conserve the culture of the privileged or at least
>> their mythic appropriation and re-construction of it. They claim western
>> cultural and technological superiority is evolution at work an essential
>> expression of their identity and that "nature" should be let off the
>> leash.
>> In this sense they are essentialist and vitalists and find common cause
>> with the survival of the fittest, might is right logics of
>> Libertarians/ancaps.They share the belief that authority is not rooted in
>> the constructions the rational or man made which risks critical scrutiny,
>> rather authority is located 'natural law' or in the mystical the mythical,
>> beyond the reach of reason or man made law, here is the extreme rights
>> obsession with new age spiritualism and the occult. The man and machine
>> are
>> subservient and must always work in the service of myth. Its a pretty dark
>> view of human beings to say the least but it should be clear how they can
>> appropriate and mobilise certain cultural tendencies that normally are
>> considered benign. The transcendent Hero, the Superman, the Warrior for
>> example.
>>
>> Berlin's lectures do not look so much at contemporary fascism as much as
>> the ideological roots in the counter-enlightenment, Vico, Harmann, Herder
>> and then De Maistre who he particularly terms a proto fascist. In the 3
>> lectures on culture he follow Vico to Harmann. Then there are two other
>> lectures one on Harmann and De Maistre.
>>
>> http://mediapub.it.ox.ac.uk/feeds/129062/audio.xml
>>
>>
>>
>>

-- 
Skype: kev.flanagan
Phone: +353 87 743 5660
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