nettime's uebertranzi on Tue, 3 Sep 2002 19:09:23 +0200 (CEST) |
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Re: <nettime> A big tranzi did it [3x] |
Table of Contents: Re: <nettime> A big tranzi did it and ran away Carl Guderian <carlg@vermilion-sands.com> Re: <nettime> Tranzis, Up.. & Fonte | The Ideological War Within the West "Shaun ROLPH" <shaun@palefire.fsnet.co.uk> Intellectuals' Betrayal of the Working Classes "ben moretti" <bmoretti@chariot.net.au> ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 03 Sep 2002 09:25:54 +0000 From: Carl Guderian <carlg@vermilion-sands.com> Subject: Re: <nettime> A big tranzi did it and ran away Yeah, that's the image I got too: powerful but well-meaning guys in dresses. Or maybe Harry the Bastard as a vampire from the Transvaal (from The Young Ones). I predict a short future for "tranzi." The usual suspects would love to score another hit like "politically correct" or even "feminazi," but there's no time for the careful dissemination campaigns of the past. No time to find or concoct a half-dozen high-concept horror stories and multiply them into ubiquity. The PC horrors were pretty colorful--feminazi po-mo professors flunking non-gender-santized term papers, Jewish students calling noisy black students "water buffaloes." Great stuff. Angry white men didn't have a chance. But how can tranzis match that? Tranzis from Brussels shut down all U.S. white power websites? ICANN took away my little girl's doman name? (er...) Besides, the sort of mischief tranzi supposedly get up to is a mirror of what transnational executives actually do. It's easy enough to turn it around--tranzis giving your job to a Chinese convict, dumping copper salts into your local lake and jacking up your electricity bill. And taking away your little girl's etc. Tranzi is just too contrived to survive long exposure. It sounds corny and constipated, like Christian rock. It'll be deader than All Your Base the moment any prominent right-winger actually says the word on TV. And this being internet time, this will happen very quickly. For great justice, Carl N Jett wrote: > > All we need now is a scary looking symbol to put on flags and armbands... > > http://www.newsmax.com/commentarchive.shtml?a=2002/8/30/121900 > > Nazis and Commies and Tranzis ... Oh My! > Richard Poe > Aug. 30, 2002 > > First there was Communism. Then Fascism. Then Nazism. Then Communism > again. Now there's a new ideology in town. It's called Tranzi-ism. - -- Better Confederate bonds in your vest pocket, sir, than Yankee bonds around your wrists and ankles -- propaganda poster, c. 1864 ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 3 Sep 2002 13:01:32 +0100 From: "Shaun ROLPH" <shaun@palefire.fsnet.co.uk> Subject: Re: <nettime> Tranzis, Up.. & Fonte | The Ideological War Within the West Fonte wrote : In international politics, in the period immediately prior to 9/11, the EU opposed the U. S. on some of the most important global issues, including the ICC, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, the Land Mine Treaty, the Kyoto Global Warming Treaty, and policy towards missile defense, Iran, Iraq, Israel, China, Cuba, North Korea, and the death penalty. I write (with some incredulity) : Let me see if i'm holding this the right way up - unconfined national sovereignty allows a nation to avoid war crimes trials and environmental obligations. It allows nuclear testing, the seeding of land mines, to pre-emptively attack other nations in breach of international law and lets her have star wars and old sparky. And if I've read Fonte's piece correctly he wishes me to defend it from the Transnational Progressives . Laughable ,surely, except to the usual suspects on the right. Because there really isn't anything new here. Fonte's problem with *Transnational Progressivism* isn't so much that it's transnational, but that it's progressive. As US party politics have converged tightly around a right-wing consensus the left have had to find new ways to get back into the system. And Fonte has just spotted them flying in under the radar , using international institutions rather than black helicopters , but the high-pitched sound of paranoia echoes just the same. US nationalism always comes out sounding wrong, somehow. It's so, well, *old-fashioned* an idea. As , I think , Bruce Sterling suggested - is there anything more visibly post-sovereign than the current internet ? Splendid Isolation wears a wing-collar and spats. ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 3 Sep 2002 17:30:18 +0950 From: "ben moretti" <bmoretti@chariot.net.au> Subject: Intellectuals=?ISO-8859-1?B?kiA=?=Betrayal of the Working Classes [More enlightening material from the Hudson Institute, the very same institution supporting John Fonte's inklings on Tranzis aka The International Jewish/Masonic Banking Conspiracy. I feel these commentators would approve of sending students and intellectuals out into the country for reeducation. Now I know where John Howard gets his material from. B] http://www.hudson.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=publication_details&id=1939 August 31, 2002 Intellectuals' Betrayal of the Working Classes by Mark Wegierski In Canada and the United States, the holiday honoring workers and the union movement is celebrated on the first Monday of September, as Labor Day, to avoid the radical connotations of May Day. In some parts of Europe, by contrast, May Day is still celebrated with enthusiasm by socialist and far left parties who share in the idealism of earlier, nineteenth-century workers’ struggles. However, relations between “the progressive intelligentsia” (who style themselves the vanguard of the proletariat) and the so-called proletariat itself have almost always been problematic. Even leaving aside the excrescences of Soviet Communism (and its various offshoots), the record of Western “progressive” intellectuals with regard to real workers has been questionable at best. The emotional valuations of the social classes required by Marxism were, to a large extent, arbitrary. For instance, the “petit bourgeois” (the lower middle-class) were utterly despised, even though they often had to live a hardscrabble existence and despite the fact that many in the intelligentsia themselves came from well-to-do backgrounds. Moreover, when confronted by the social conservatism of much of the proletariat, left-wing intellectuals fell back on theories of “false consciousness” and came to embrace what classical Marxism had derisively termed the lumpenproletariat (the lowest substratum of society, especially criminals and vagrants). The 1960s generally, and in particular the thought of the psychiatrist and anticolonialist intellectual Frantz Fanon, marked the repudiation of the “embourgeoified” proletariat in favor of what classical Marxism would simply have called the lumpen. The classical Marxist categories, however, may have some residual usefulness in explaining what really was going on in the United States in the second half of the twentieth century. What Marxism termed the petit bourgeoisie and the proletariat are arguably the socially conservative core of the country today, regardless of formal party affiliations. To extend slightly the argument made in James Burnham’s political classic, The Managerial Revolution (1941), the haut bourgeoisie (upper class)—with a scant few exceptions—has morphed into the managerial New Class, which today includes the superrich, most sports and media celebrities, and high-ranking bureaucrats and social experts. This New Class has allied with and adopted elements of the lumpenproletariat’s “countercultural” lifestyles, in a direct affront to the more traditional morality of the middle and working classes. This precipitous behavioral shift among most of the upper class was aptly termed “the revolt of the elites” by the eminent social critic Christopher Lasch, in his 1995 book of the same name. Political analyst Kevin Phillips argued in the 1960s that the winning combination in American politics was “social conservatism plus economic liberalism” (or the acceptance by conservatives of the welfare state). Roosevelt’s New Deal appealed, rhetorically at least, to Americans’ sense of decency and portrayed itself as the only way out of the Great Depression. Conservatives of that day had appeared to trap themselves in what seemed like a rhetorically difficult defense of economic privilege and a foundering laissez-faire capitalism. The New Deal strategy of class-war rhetoric has been a continuing staple of Democratic Party appeals to American voters ever since. Ironically, however, beginning in the 1980s, much of the Republican Party’s appeal came to be based on a formula of social liberalism plus economic conservatism. The “yuppies” of the 1980s, for example, were typically fiscally conservative and socially liberal. Today’s “compassionate conservatism” may be a hopeful-sounding term, but in practice it also has tended to leave socially liberal policies in place. The results of the 2000 U.S. Presidential election, with a massive heartland colored red and the urban and coastal areas colored blue, supports this type of analysis. The contemporary social class that David Brooks has called the Bobos (short for “bourgeois bohemians”) are the core of left-liberalism today, and are centered in big cities. Like most “progressive” intellectuals, including their European predecessors, they are put off by those who do productive labor, viewing them as irredeemably backward and full of hidebound attitudes. This Labor Day, they will not be celebrating actual laborers, but a politically correct image of them that has never been reflected in reality. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the Hudson Institute. Mark Wegierski is a Canadian writer and researcher who has written for several publications, including Telos and The World & I. ------------------------------ # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net