העורך Editor

It seems clear there were at least two of them if you catch my drift… See this article.

Theoretically, the Revolution is about the power and necessity to recreate mankind. In practice, for almost all progressive movements it is about gaining power for the revolutionaries and making war on those who stand in their way. For example, transcending private property, the division of labor, and political oppression was never Marxism-Leninism’s core motive any more than worker/peasant proletarians were ever its core protagonists. In fact, Communism is an ideology by, of, and for ideologues, that ends up empowering and celebrating those very ideologues. This is as true of progressivism’s other branches as it is of Marxism.

Lenin’s seminal contribution was explicitly to recognize the revolutionary party’s paramount primacy, and to turn the party’s power and prestige from a means to revolution into the Revolution’s candid end. Lenin’s writings, like Marx’s, contain no positive description of future economic arrangements. The Soviet economy, for all its inefficiencies, functioned with Swiss precision as an engine of privilege for some and of murderous deprivation for others. The Communist Party had transcended communism. The key to understanding what progressive parties in power do is the insight, emphasized by “elite theorists” like Vilfredo Pareto and Gaetano Mosca, that any organization’s practical objectives turn out to be what serves the interests and proclivities of its leaders.

What serves progressive revolutionaries’ interests is not in doubt. Although each of progressivism’s branches differs in how it defines society’s “structural” fault, in its own name for the human reality that it seeks to overcome, and in the means by which to achieve its ends, progressives from the 19th century to our time are well nigh identical in their personal predilections—in what and whom they hate even more than in what they love. They see the culture of what Marxists call “bourgeois morality” as the negation of their identity and authority. That identity, their identity, is to be promoted, endlessly, by endless warfare against that culture. That is why the cultural campaigns of otherwise dissimilar progressives have been so similar. Leninist Russia no less than various Western democrats have tried to eradicate religion, to make it difficult for men, women, and children to exist as families, and to demand that their subjects join them in celebrating the new order that reflects their identity. Note well: cultural warfare’s substantive goal is less important than the affirmation of the warriors’ own identity. This is what explains the animus with which progressives have waged their culture wars.

Yet, notwithstanding progressivism’s premise that individual minds merely reflect society’s basic structure and hence are incapable of reasoning independently about true and false, better and worse, reality forces progressives to admit that individuals often choose how they think or act despite lacking the “structural” basis for doing so, or that they act contrary to the economic, social, or racial “classes” into which progressive theories divide mankind. They call this freedom of the human mind “false consciousness.”

…

Why does the American Left demand ever-new P.C. obeisances? In 2012 no one would have thought that defining marriage between one man and one woman, as enshrined in U.S. law, would brand those who do so as motivated by a culpable psychopathology called “homophobia,” subject to fines and near-outlaw status. Not until 2015-16 did it occur to anyone that requiring persons with male personal plumbing to use public bathrooms reserved for men was a sign of the same pathology. Why had not these become part of the P.C. demands previously? Why is there no canon of P.C. that, once filled, would require no further additions?

Because the point of P.C. is not and has never been merely about any of the items that it imposes, but about the imposition itself…

Excerpt from an article on Claremont, here.

כך שומעים אנו מכאלו שהושפעו מתורות זרות, ואונם מתוספתא, אותה מצטטים רק חלקית.

זה לשון התוספתא סוף מנחות בשלימותה:

א”ר יוחנן בן תורתא, מפני מה חרבה שילה, מפני בזיון קדשים שבתוכה. ירושלים בנין הראשון מפני מה חרבה, מפני עבודת כוכבים וגלוי עריות ושפיכות דמים שהיו בתוכה. אבל באחרונה מכירין אנו בהן שהן עמלים בתורה וזהירין במעשרות, מפני מה גלו? מפני שאוהבין את הממון ושונאין איש את רעהו. ללמדך שקשה שנאת איש את רעהו לפני המקום ושקלה הכתוב כנגד עבודת כוכבים וגלוי עריות ושפיכות דמים.

אבל בבנין האחרון שעתידה לבנות בחיינו ובימינו מה נאמר בו, והיה באחרית הימים נכון יהיה הר בית ה’ בראש ההרים וגו’ והלכו עמים רבים ואמרו לכו ונעלה אל הר ה’ ואל בית אלהי יעקב וגו’, ואומר כי יש יום קראו נוצרים בהר אפרים קומו ונעלה ציון אל ה’ אלהינו.

בדיני הלואות על ריבית אוי לי אם אומר ואוי לי אם לא אומר ועכ”פ תדע שעל כל התרים נאמר היחתה איש אש בחיקו ובגדיו לא תשרפנה וטוב לפני ה’ ימלט מזה כו’

וישים ללבו לשמור ולעשות כי ישרים דרכי ה’ וכל דבר יכול להעשות ע”פ היתר.

Rabbi Elyashiv enabled the Gush Katif expulsion of ten thousand Jews from their homes in the land of Israel. This was Mesirah. What was his stated excuse? And how did his excuse fare in reality?

The Chareidi political representatives do (almost) exactly what they are told by the leadership of their parties. This is what they are there for, and it couldn’t be any other way. So when we criticize them for all the evil they do, let us be honest about whom we are accusing; the “Gedolim”.

The coalition of non-Jewish Ariel Sharon, of accursed memory, could not have survived without the Chareidi members of Knesset. What convinced Rabbi Elyashiv to have them join? Two things:

• “Expelling” Shinui from the coalition.
• The “Libah” curriculum would not be forced upon the Chareidi education system.

And so, the coalition government was enabled. Rabbi Elyashiv then had Ravitz of Degel vote for the crucial “reparations law” farce. Having ensured the infamous deed, Rabbi Elyashiv’s messengers then went through the motions of voting against the expulsion itself, safe in the assurance they would be outnumbered, of course.

Needless to say, the rabbi never bothered to first hear the side of the Jews he was condemning, just as he never waited to hear from Rabbi Nosson Kaminetzky and others, whose lives he destroyed without a thought. There was, indeed, a delegation which came to beg for their lives, but they came of their own accord, and were paid no attention.

What happened since?

• Instead of Shinui, they got Ya’ir Lapid (also later defeated, but for a terrible price, and it’s not over yet by far).
• Instead of Libah, they got tenfold government educational interventions.