What would you say are the "basic tenets" of liberalism?? Like whenever ppl talk about it I'm just like uh idk what ideas it espouses
Essentially, liberalism is the ideology of capitalism. Besides liberals time and time again showing they are not for workers or oppressed people and are in fact a political trend of capitalism-imperialism, its important to know its basic tenants and assumptions so one can recognize liberalism and criticize it or struggle against it. I’m going to paraphrase a section of Anrudha Ghandy’s book, Philosophical Trends in the Feminist Movement (the original section focuses on liberalism in the feminist movement, here ive tried to paraphrase it to apply to liberalism in general):
1. [Liberalism] focuses on individual rights rather than (and even at the expense of) collective rights
2. It is ahistorical. It rejects class struggle and as such has no comprehensive understanding of workers’ and other oppressed peoples’ roles in history and society, or an analysis to explain the reasons behind their subjugation and exploitation.
3. It is mechanical in its support for formal equality, equality-in-words, without a concrete understanding of the roots of inequality, or without an understanding of the different sections of the population and their specific problems. As a result it expresses the demands of upper and middle classes, without much thought to oppressed nations or the working classes.
4. It is reformist. It focuses on changes in the law, welfare programs, education without a larger revolutionary program and does not question the underlying economic and political roots of oppression and exploitation
5. It views the state as a neutral tool to be used instead of an instrument of the ruling, capitalist class which benefits from the exploitation of workers and neo-colonies.
6. Because of its focus on changing laws and it’s general unprincipled pacifism it is unable of mobilizing workers and the oppressed to a greater stage of political struggle against capitalism and for socialism.
To add to this, liberalism’s reformist and gradualist attitudes towards progress not only run counter to a dialectical understanding of quantity into quality, where the opposites of a contradiction push forward change in both “steps” and “leaps”, but also ignores class struggle by promoting unprincipled peace and cooperation beween competing classes in capitalist society. This “live-and-let-live” attitude results in placing personal interests above the interests of the masses, and leads to opportunism in political work. It promotes superficial peace instead of working to resolve contradictions through struggle, criticism and self-criticism, and (principled) unity.
Its individualism is not one of any socialist conception, even. Rather, this individualism is to show that the individual is threatened by the community. It says that the individual has to be protected from the community (either through an increase in government action and programs or through smaller government). As a result it promotes a lot of capitalistic ideas about the role of the individual- that the individual exists only to care for itself, that success and failure is simply a matter of how hard one works (the market being seen as a neutral tool to determine marginal productivity), and that the individual as a political unit exists before and outside of society and the community.
This all goes to show that liberalism is an ideology not of the oppressed and workers, but of bourgeois intellectuals, those who, because they are not oppressed or exploited, can afford to “see both sides” and “find a middle ground” instead of taking a firm stance on a question of a struggle for power, justice, and equality. Liberalism is the ideology of capitalism, of the ruling and middle classes, and it will never be able to liberate the working class.
“…people like Jesus and Paul were not executed for saying, “Love one another.” They were killed because their understanding of love meant more than being compassionate towards individuals, although it did include that. It also meant standing against the domination systems that rule their world, and collaborating with the Spirit in the creation of a new way of life that stood in contrast to the normalcy of the wisdom of this world. Love and justice go together. Justice without love can be brutal and love without justice can be banal. Love is the heart of justice and justice is the social form of love.”
— Marcus J. Borg and John Dominic Crossan, The First Paul: Reclaiming the Radical Visionary Behind the Church’s Conservative Icon (p.205)
The real George Orwell Orwell is held up today as a far-seeing prophet, a brave truth-teller and a moral giant of socialism. References to h
Both Orwell’s mother and father’s families were European colonial aristocrats. His great-great-grandfather was an Earl who owned several sugar plantations with over 200 slaves in Jamaica. He was compensated for their “loss” in 1833 by the British government (using taxes reaped from colonial profits) when human slavery was made illegal by the British – in an attempt to forestall the powerful slave uprisings threatening the destruction of European colonies in the Caribbean, as had happened with Haiti. Orwell’s mother came from a line of French colonial investors. His mother’s sister would financially bail Orwell out multiple times in his life. Orwell himself was born in the British Raj: colonial India which was the ‘Jewel In The Crown’ of the British Empire – from which they extracted an estimated $45 trillion. His father was an opium inspector. [...]
Orwell grew up with a team of maids and servants serving him and his family as lords and masters. Throughout the rest of his life, even as a socialist, Orwell never regarded colonized peoples as his true equal. In 1912 Orwell’s family moved to Britain. Orwell says he took his “first sniff of English air” and never wanted to leave. He was enrolled in Eton, the most elite boarding school in the country – they had so many alumni reaching the rank of Prime Minister that the school established a tradition to give the students the day off for the occasion. [...]
After graduating from school Orwell took the decision as a 19 year old man to join Britain’s Indian Imperial police in Burma. [...] A nationalist movement, led by Buddhist monks, was growing in the region, and there were anti-colonial riots spreading in the country. Young Orwell was given counterinsurgency training by the British colonial administration – techniques which he would use throughout his life, culminating in the older Orwell’s final collaboration with MI6 in the last months of his life.
Orwell also had fun: an opium smoker and habitual brothel visitor during his six years in Burma, he wrote crude poetry about the young girls he slept with, paying them pennies. His acquaintances decades later said George would become wistful when talking about Burmese girls. He of course had many servants, and wrote in his diary how he would beat them when they displeased him. He mentioned that his 12-year old boy servant was beautiful and touched him like a woman, whatever this might mean: "When you have a lot of servants you soon get into lazy habits, and I habitually allowed myself, for instance, to be dressed and undressed by my Burmese boy. This was because he was a Burman and undisgusting; I could not have endured to let an English manservant handle me in that intimate manner. I felt towards a Burman almost as I felt towards a woman. Like most other races, the Burmese have a distinctive smell—I cannot describe it: it is a smell that makes one’s teeth tingle—but this smell never disgusted me. (Incidentally, Orientals say that we smell. The Chinese, I believe, say that a white man smells like a corpse. The Burmese say the same)"
The lanky, awkward, Hitler-mustache wearing Orwell was known to react furiously when Burmese colonial subjects deigned to show him the proper respect. In one incident he beat a group of school boys in the street when their “yellow faces” “provoked” him.
[...]
Orwell was gradually positioning himself as a socialist (in 1937 the British Communist Party rebuked him for travelling to Lancashire to “see how the working class live” and focusing mainly on how they smell – while never mentioning their bosses making their lives miserable) and when civil war broke out in Republican Spain, Orwell announced to his new wife [...] that he was leaving immediately for Spain. The International Brigades were organised by the Communist International; and the British Communist Party rejected Orwell for his anti-communist views. The International Brigades were organised by the Communist International; and the British Communist Party rejected Orwell for his anti-communist views. So Orwell got a letter from the ‘radical’ Labour Party pressure group (the Independent Labour Party), joining a band of British trotskyites embedded in the POUM trotskyite militia in Spain. Many of Orwell’s British and other comrades within this militia eventually turned out to be British (and fascist) intelligence agents. This characteristic – a secret Military Intelligence background – was also revealed later with the intellectuals and writers in Orwell’s social circle years later when he became a successful writer. Orwell was posted to the Aragon front, and saw little action. However he got wounded by a sniper and was sent to Barcelona for treatment. While he was there the POUM militia launched a coup against the Republican government, and Orwell participated in it. If Orwell fired any bullets in anger during the Spanish Civil War, it was as likely at Spanish Communists as fascists. After the failed POUM coup, Orwell was briefly arrested by the Spanish republican police who found a copy of Hitler’s Mein Kampf in his possession. [...] When Orwell got back to Britain he wrote ‘Homage to Catalonia’ based on his experiences. However his small left-wing publisher baulked at publishing the anti-communist text Orwell had written, as war against the Nazis loomed on the horizon. Orwell took his book to publisher Frederic Warburg, an anti-communist who was later revealed as an MI6 and CIA asset who published the first English language translation of Mein Kampf in Britain.
[...]
While the Soviets were defeating the Nazi war machine alone at Stalingrad, George was writing in his is nationally published column that “criticising Russia and Stalin” are the test of intellectual bravery.
[...]
A subtle but key part of 1984 is its misogyny, with the only female character in it depicted as a brainless and sexually promiscuous vamp. Orwell’s “childhood sweetheart” recognised this character as based on herself; when she wrote to Orwell, he responded with a cold and accusing letter. She later revealed that Orwell had attempted to rape her when he was aged 17. Orwell had several other accusations of sexual assault: one against a BBC colleague, another against a school teacher and many against his friends. Numerous of his sexual partners were from subservient positions; he slept with numerous secretaries for example. As a 27 year old man he gave a love poem to a 15 year old girl who he was a family tutor to. Orwell was also a serial “sex tourist” visitor to the poor and colonized world, where any sexual assaults would not have been recorded. [...] We don’t know if Orwell fathered any children during his is sex tourism. However for his beloved English nation, he wanted abortion banned for “patriotic” reasons.
[...]
Orwell heavily “borrowed” (or stole) ideas from his wife or from Soviet author Yevgeny Zamyatin in writing his novels Animal Farm and 1984. Another victim of Orwell’s intellectual theft was Gertrude Elias, a Jewish-Austrian refugee who fled the Nazis for Britain and met Orwell in 1941 when they were both working at the Ministry of Information. A talented artist, she showed Orwell some of her drawings and storyboards for a fairy tale allegory about the Nazis as pigs taking over the farm. Orwell being a writer, she thought they could collaborate. Orwell of course stole the idea, but flipped the meaning: instead of warning about Nazis, he targeted Communists and the USSR. This was a pattern for Orwell: stealing communist work and perverting the meaning. [...] Aside from making a mockery of scientific socialism, the tool for liberation of the working class, Orwell spends much of his writing mocking the working class themselves. [...]
His hate for the colonised working class was even more explicit. About his time in Burma Orwell wrote: “As a police officer I was an obvious target and was baited whenever it seemed safe to do so. When a nimble Burman tripped me up on the football field and the referee (another Burman) looked the other way, the crowd yelled with hideous laughter. This happened more than once. In the end the sneering yellow faces of young men that met me everywhere, the insults hooted after me when I was at a safe distance, got badly on my nerves. The young Buddhist priests were the worst of all. There were several thousands of them in the town and none of them seemed to have anything to do except stand on street corners and jeer at Europeans.”
About the masses of Marrakech, Orwell wrote: “When you walk through a town like this–two hundred thousand inhabitants, of whom at least twenty thousand own literally nothing except the rags they stand up in–when you see how the people live, and still more how easily they die, it is always difficult to believe that you are walking among human beings. All colonial empires are in reality founded upon that fact. The people have brown faces- besides, there are so many of them! Are they really the same flesh as yourself? Do they even have names? Or are they merely a kind of undifferentiated brown stuff, about as individual as bees or coral insects? They rise out of the earth, they sweat and starve for a few years, and then they sink back into the nameless mounds of the graveyard and nobody notices that they are gone.”
While he was writing 1984 Orwell was regularly visited by a social circle of intellectuals, both “socialist” and reactionary, many of whom had intelligence ties. One of these colleagues was “socialist”-turned-neocon Stephen Spender, despite Orwell despising to him as a ‘pansie’ due to his homosexuality. Being a “friend” of Orwell, as well as a fellow so anti-communist “socialist”/neocon and intellectual working for British military intelligence, did not save Stephen Spender from making the list Orwell handed over to MI6 in the last months of his life.
One of Orwell’s contacts was Celia Kirwan, a researcher and agent at the Information Research Department – which was a global anti-communist propaganda project run by British military intelligence targeting both the Western public and the colonised peoples of the Global South. The IRD was set up by the “progressive” Labour government of Clement Atlee in 1948. Their first mission was to hammer into the public’s head that the Nazi death camps which the Soviets had liberated were not as bad as imaginary Soviet death camps. This was to distract from the concentration camps and genocide the British where inflicting on on Malaya/Malaysia and Kenya at that time. Kirwan’s boss at the MI6 IRD was “historian” Robert Conquest creator of much “black propaganda” about the Soviet Union – the “Great Terror” to describe the 1930s was one of his inventions. [...]
As a cop trained in intelligence work from age 19, Orwell kept detailed notes on contacts and popular figures, be they “friend” or foe. The list Orwell handed over to his MI6 handler contained at least 130 names (he may have handed over 3 different lists with hundreds of names) with notes – a third of which are still a British state secret to this day. Those that have been publicly released reveal Orwell’s bias. Ignorant adjectives such as ‘anti-white’, ‘Irish.’ and the frequent ‘Jew?’ are liberally sprinkled. His entire body of work, full of contempt and derision towards the colonized, Irish and Jewish people can be consulted in case this bigoted policeman’s report is not clear.
[...]
America has never had a ‘Department Of Culture’ to support artists, writers, musicians and other cultural workers – except ironically for a CIA front called the Congress of Cultural Freedom. This ‘congress’ was how the CIA managed a network of foundations and NGOs to promote Capitalist Art and Western Supremacy among intellectuals. Philosopher Bertrand Russell, theorist Michel Foucault, artist Mark Rothko, filmmaker Cecile B DeMille, feminist Gloria Steinem were some of the many cultural figures funded and brought to prominence by the CIA. Also established by the CIA Congress of Cultural Freedom project in the US, the Information Research Department in the UK and similar operations worldwide was a library of progressive and ‘socialist’ magazines aimed at intellectuals – all with one united cardinal rule: they had to be anti-communist. The man who conceived of the Congress of Cultural Freedom was another “former communist” CIA agent, Arthur Koestler. Orwell was good friends with him; like Orwell, Koestler was also an accused rapist. Koestler was himself married to the twin sister of Orwell’s MI6 handler, Celia Kirwan. Orwell was in fact a key figure in this nexus. In 1945 he helped set up the “Freedom Defence Committee”, anti-communist rival to the powerful communist-led human rights network at the time. It was through this that he met Arthur Koestler. Together they strategized the concept of the the Congress of Cultural Freedom. Together they attempted to form a human rights group similar to Amnesty International which, was established 15 years later – by a lawyer who was also an FBI informant on radical groups in the US, spying on the Black Panthers and assisting in the assassination of Fred Hampton. [...] Orwell was a central figure in this formation, however his early death just as the Cold War was taking off, meant that this life long-cop and agent never took his mission to the next stage. Instead his social circle of “friends” went on to be successful writers, editors, founders and other agents in this cultural war-machine. Orwell himself became something of a Patron Saint of these propagandists, the cartoon made of his book Animal Farm was not only the first animated film made by the CIA, but the first feature length British cartoon ever made.
Orwell today is a standard staple of school curriculums, and both young children and grown academics are taught to put aside critical thinking facilities when evaluating what Orwell stood for. However when we lay out and assess the private thoughts (shown in his personal diary and private letters), his public beliefs (taken from his many books and articles) and his actions (the various projects, campaigns and activities he participated in) we can sum up the following themes that Orwell stood for: misogynist, homophobe, racist, Imperialist, anti-communist, poverty-tourist, state-propagandist, hypocrite and bad writer.
In June 1763, Fort Michilimackinac soldiers and officers were watching Indians play lacrosse in front of the fort gates. The match was in honor of King George’s birthday. At a critical moment, the ball landed near the open gates, and the players rushed toward the fort. As they threw down their sticks, Indian women passed the players hatchets from beneath their blankets. The warriors seized Captain Etherington and Lieutenant Leslie, who had been watching the game. In another instant, Lieutenant John Jamet, fifteen British soldiers, and a trader named Tracey were dead. Two other soldiers were wounded; the rest of the garrison was taken prisoner. Two weeks earlier, in mid-May, Fort Sandusky had been captured and burned by the Wyandot, who killed nearly all of its soldiers, ransoming only Ensign Paully, the commander. Later in May, Fort St. Joseph also fell. The Potawatomi killed eleven soldiers and the post commander, Ensign Schlösser. Only three men remained to be taken prisoner and ransomed. Two days after Fort St. Joseph fell, an Ensign Holmes leaving Fort Miami was shot to death. Threatened with torture, his men opened the fort gates to the Indians. In mid-June, when Ensign Price and thirteen men attempted to escape Fort Le Boeuf by the rear entrance, Indians set the fort on fire. Five men died. Eight grueling days afterward, Price and seven of his men reached safety at Fort Pitt, which was also attacked but not taken. Led by Ensign Christie, the twenty-four-man garrison at Fort Presque Isle briefly resisted the assault by two hundred warriors, thought better of it, and quickly surrendered. They were carried off to Detroit for ransom. When Fort Venango fell on June 20, its Indian assailants killed Lieutenant Gordon and all of his men. The garrison of L’Arbre Croche hastily abandoned it on June 21, in advance of a feared Indian attack. Only Fort Ouiatenon was spared this type of violent confrontation: the Wea simply walked in, and Lieutenant Edward Jenkins and his fifteen British soldiers surrendered to them. The Wea never fired a shot nor raised a tomahawk. By the end of June, six weeks after the first onslaught began, the only unsubdued British soldiers in the western Great Lakes were those under siege at Detroit.
The uprisings in spring 1763, known as Pontiac’s Rebellion, proved a bitter lesson for the British about how to govern the Indian people of the Great Lakes. Twelve British forts were besieged, eight fell, many British soldiers died, and several English and Scots-Irish traders were killed. Most, but not all, of the officers were ransomed. Although Detroit was the only fort west of Niagara to remain under British control, it suffered a debilitating four-month siege. Pontiac’s Rebellion brought together numerous warriors from diverse villages for the common design of driving the British from Indian lands, a vivid reminder that the western Great Lakes region remained Indian Country. Britain had defeated France in the Seven Years’ War, but the Anglo-French negotiations that transferred Indian lands excluded representatives of the Indian communities inhabiting them. Lands were the bargaining chips of European empires, but the distance that made them easy to cede also made them hard to control. In the Great Lakes, European empires existed with the consent of Indians who manipulated imperial rivalries to meet their own goals. In this world where imperial power was tentative and fragile, Indians could influence imperial designs and colonial realities—at the walls of a frontier fort, if not at the table of a foreign ministry. Britain’s victory in the Seven Years’ War gave it hegemony in the western Great Lakes, but not authority.
— Susan Sleeper-Smith, Indigenous Prosperity and American Conquest: Indian women of the Ohio River Valley, 1690–1792
Bosc pear slices, sautéed in brown butter, honey and a bit of nutmeg. Paired them with a toasted sourdough slice and finished with some creamy, Gorgonzola Dolce.
moleskine makes people hate pens and is probably a huge part of why so many people give up on good pens.
to folks who might not know, moleskine is extremely famous AND infamous. they are hardcover notebooks with elastic enclosures. they are expensive, and sold everywhere from pharmacies to bookstores, and does collaborations with a variety of brands including james bond and pokemon. moleskine has tried to establish itself as a luxury notebook, which it technically is.
as long as you do not write in it.
moleskine paper is wholeheartedly shit. it is complete fucking garbage. you might wonder, what makes good paper? well the first thing is how well it can be written on. good paper can handle ink well. good ink handling means clear, solid lines without any feathering (fuzzy spreading), not bleeding through the page, and not ghosting. basically, you want paper that can do crisp lines with a variety of different inks and be used on both sides.
moleskine does not do that. anything more than a ballpoint or pencil will look fuzzy and gross and bleed right through the fucking page. the paper is shit. and that makes people think their pen is shit. and ballpoint pens can be seen on the other side of the page.
common knowledge is that fountain pens, rollerball pens, gel pens, felt pens, and more work better on good paper. good meaning good with ink. but when many people think good paper without knowing any better, they will reach for a moleskine notebook. because moleskine is expensive and advertises itself as good and is widely available. so people try out actually good writing implements on this shit paper, see how bad it works, and then blame the pen.
fountain pens, gel pens, and rollerball require much less pressure than ballpoint pens. they are ergonomic. easier on joints, easier for chronic pain. and moleskine makes people give up on them. nobody wants shitty bleeding feathered lines.
in the united states, our ideas of good paper and good stationery in general are extremely warped. so much of this is because paper here fucking sucks. a lot of paper performs like moleskine. there is shit paper at all price ranges. but you can pick up caliber brand paper (the ones that say made in vietnam) from cvs and have infinitely better performance for pennies. even though it looks low quality, caliber paper (vietnam) can even handle calligraphy ink clearly. bad paper makes people hate good pens and bad pens make people hate writing.
another thing really important to mention, a lot of people think thick paper is always better. this is extremely wrong. in terms of being able to handle a wide variety of inks clearly and cleanly, some of the best paper in the world is tissue thin (tomoe river).
do not buy moleskine. even if the stand is right there. they have some of the worst paper you can get at that price point. expensive paper is not always good paper, good pens need good paper, moleskine paper makes good pens seem awful, and moleskine is something you should only give to someone you loathe.
God Moleskine is such a frustrating product, and as an aspiring stationer, I hate that it’s so popular in North America. They’re beautifully constructed, yes, but god the 70gsm paper that they use is SUCH GARBAGE when it comes to inks wetter than a ballpoint pen. They do offer heavier paper - 100-200gsm weight - but only in extremely expensive, large, or difficult to find products.
Leuchtturm 1917 produces great sketching books and, if you get their 120gsm notebooks, they hold up to inks fantastically. Their standard notebooks come in 80gsm paper, and that does hold up to fountain pen ink much better than Moleskine, but while you do get much less feathering and bleeding, there is still some bleedthrough with wetter pens.
Now, if you want the finest fountain pen paper I’ve found in a notebook format, you want Maruman’s Mnemosyne 183. It’s also an 80gsm paper, but it’s treated and laid in such a way that there’s no feathering or bleeding, even with a very wet fountain pen.
That said though, honestly the best notebook I have, in terms of accessibility, expense, and quality of paper, is a Brandz United notebook that I got for my birthday a few years back. It’s not anything special, in terms of paper weight - I can’t find anything concrete, but it feels like 80gsm to me - but it barely feathers and you need to really saturate the page for it to bleed through.
Also, if you’re looking for loose paper, I highly recommend Tomoe River’s paper - so fine and thin you can practically see through it, but it holds ink like a sponge, doesn’t bleed, has no feathering, and is smooth as glass. For correspondence, though, I am a fan of G. Lalo’s Pur Vélin, which is a 125gsm 50% cotton and 50% wood pulp paper. It’s absolutely beautiful and has just enough grain to it that there’s a super pleasant tactile feedback when you’re writing.
And if you want to go a lil’ bit fancy with gorgeous designs (and I mean GORGEOUS designs), look up Castelli.
My current fave. No feathering, no bleeding, works perfect with ballpoint pens and with fountain pens, and the paper is super smooth. I’ve literally written novels in these fuckers. Also: cheaper than moleskine.
@jimtheviking already mentioned Leuchtturm; I’m adding Black n’ Red, Clairefontaine and Rhodia.
All have better paper than Moleskine, which has been milking its early reputation for years while product quality went downhill. Now they’re just another Lifestyle Accessory for people who shop by brand-name.
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