Re: <nettime> A big tranzi did it [3x]

["nettime's uebertranzi" <nettime-l@bbs.thing.net>]

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>                                         



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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


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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.


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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.


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