version

Well-known member
I don't think you've ever told me to read that. I've never even heard of it. The only recommendation I can remember you giving me is Nihilist Communism.
Oh, it's Bordiga. Yeah, you might have recommended this before actually. I've found it on Libcom now.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
Luke's problem is he sees conspiracism as arising as a contradiction, when it isn't, conspiracy type thinking is a defence of rational capitalism, as much as I tried to convince Craner and DannyL ealier. You might not like proletarian dictatorship, but there is no pragmatic middle way. Shopkeepers must be abolished.
 

version

Well-known member
To see capitalism as an infinitely stable machine gives it the theological defence it requires. Capitalism itself is unstable, it's just those instabilities are sought out in the wrong places.
That's partly what I was saying though. That it isn't stable. You can cut the head off the hydra, but it just sprouts more. It's like attacking slime mold or something.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
The only way luke can be saved is if he doesn't hate the plebs. Unfortunately, the anti-conspiracy crowd also hate plebs, so everyones trapped in an unsolveable contradiction.
 

version

Well-known member
The distinction I was making with this thread, which Danny rightly picked up on and which I was arguing with Craner about elsewhere, is that this stuff isn't conspiracy theory. It's history.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
Hornblower had befriended several faded members of the glitterati who hung around the Toni Duffer Gallery, all of whom had acquired Guelph and Chibelline pictures on the never never. We found the pop singer Bernard Barge in an overpriced restaurant. Having acquired several Guelph and Chibelline pictures, Barge had a standing invitation to visit their Fournier Street studios. Bernard wrung the promise of a date out of Hannah in return for introducing her to his artist chums. As a precaution against the possibility of jealousy, Hornblower told the former pop star that I was her art mad brother. Having accompanied us to the East End in a cab and introduced us to Guelph and Chibelline, Barge made his excuses and left. The one time Poxy Music frontman rarely visited his art bore friends after mid-morning, because by early afternoon they'd be blind drunk. Many of my readers will perhaps recall that Guelph and Chibelline made their initial reputation as 'the singing pissheads,' a pair of performance artistés who'd get up onto tables in pubs and in an inebriated state murder music hall classics such as Underneath The Arches. People thought Guelph and Chibelline were clowns, and encouraged them, their rise to fame and fortune had remarkable parallels with the career of Adolf Hitler.

'Our friend Whitebait is on her way round,' Guelph informed us.

'What,' I put in, 'you mean Roseanne Whitebait, the twit who became famous by appropriating Ross MacDonald and Joseph Campbell's idea of making plaster castes of rocks and calling the result fruitless labour?'

'The very same person,' Chibelline assured me, 'and don't be so critical, one cannot expect women to have original ideas, they are after all the second sex.'

'Would you like to hear some selections from our boxed CD set of Hitler speeches,' Guelph enquired.

'We'd be delighted,' Hannah lied.

While Guelph organised the entertainment, Chibelline poured the drinks. A half finished Wyndham Lewis fake was lying on the floor, next to an English language translation of Hitler's Mein Kampf. I picked up the drawing and admired the skilful imitation of the Vorticist style, then handed it to Hornblower who gave the sketch the once over before putting it back down on the floor.

'We can only do them when we're drunk,' Chibelline slurred, 'Wyndham had decent politics but his perception of the world was clearly tinged with insanity. The modernist culture, still unaware of the connectedness of the Aryan peoples and thinking in terms of left and right, has not understood Wyndham's political vision, just as it has not understood Blake. Like Guelph and myself, both Lewis and Blake offered the British People a regional variation on the Nazi dream of a third way beyond capitalism and communism.'

'Yes, yes,' Guelph chirped excitedly, 'we're looking forward to a new era when all the People of the world will recognise their particularity. Only then will Europe and the Third World be able to unite against the decadence of the West, that is to say against America. It is only by accepting difference that we can protect the purity and diversity of the many beautiful cultures in the world. It was the genius of Adolf Hitler to recognise this, which is why he was opposed to the rootless cosmopolitanism of New York and Hollywood. Let the regions blossom and the immigrants return to a homeland of their own, then we truly can have a Europe of the Peoples, a Europe of a Hundred Flags!'

'You see,' Chibelline screamed, as he jumped to his feet and raised his right arm in a Nazi salute, 'that's why we call ourselves Guelph and Chibelline, because we oppose the old hatreds and bring together everything that is beautiful and pure. Thanks to our Art, the Life of the People is wonderfully enhanced by the twin forces of Empire and Religion working hand in hand!'

'But,' I hissed, 'I see a problem here.'

'Oh no,' Guelph snapped, 'not the hoary old objection about the Hansa, we demolished that stupidity years ago. What we've got to do is return to the roots. Anglo-American society is a bizarre Calvinist deviation from the European norm. It was a tragedy when the Gresham family chased the Hanseatic League from Britain, subsequently establishing their Rosicrucian Invisible College, and a front operation in the form of the Royal Society. What we say is no more brothers wars. The British people have got to recognise that ultimately they are of German extraction, once we are fully reconciled with our cousins across the sea, Europe can be Great once again!'

'Up the Patriarchy!' Chibelline yelled.

'Death to Cunt Lickers!' Guelph roared.

'We like very much to be Artists, we like very much to be Nazis!' they chanted in unison. 'Ours is an Art of the People, and we are the Great Leader who will abolish the decadence of abstract painting, bringing beauty into the lives of ordinary men. We unite the Worker, the Peasant and the Solider, so that they can march happily into the Great National Socialist Future!'

Rather than constituting a single a 'Great Leader,' I might have imagined these two idiots becoming a hydra-headed monster if they hadn't been such buffoons. Besides, my objection to what they did had nothing to do with the Hanseatic League, which I've long considered as vile as that famous 'hammer of the Hansa,' the Gresham family. What I object to is a dominant culture that imposes itself on society as a mark of the alleged superiority of the ruling class. When all is said and done, institutional culture simply provides one more rhetorical 'justification' for the murderous activities of our masters.

'My problem,' I explained, 'has nothing to do with the Hansa. What I want to know is what contingency plans you have if one of you dies, because as far as I can see, if that were to happen, then the surviving partner would no longer have a career on the gallery circuit!'

'Guelph,' Chibelline howled, 'what am I to do if you die?'

'I'm not going to die!' Guelph exclaimed. 'I'm immortal!'

'Why don't you try a test to see whether he's lying,' I said as I kicked a carving knife that was lying on the floor at Chibelline.

'That's a good idea!' the inebriated twit replied as he picked up the blade and plunged it into Guelph's heart.

'It looks like your career in the art world has gone kaput,' Hannah spat at Chibelline as Guelph dropped down dead.

'Oh no!' the pisshead wailed as he plunged the knife into his own chest. 'I wouldn't have killed him if I'd been sober, but then I've been drunk for the past thirty years!'

...
As Hannah pressed the eject button on the CD, there was a second knock on the door. I got up and answered the summons, only to be confronted by a very ugly woman in her late-thirties, whose long red hair was flying all over the place.

'Who are you?' the creature demanded.

'A visitor,' I tried to reassure her.

'I'm Roseanne Whitebait,' the woman informed me, 'and I guess you must be the important neo-Nazi leader Guelph and Chibelline said was coming to visit them sometime this week.'

'Do I look like a Nazi?' I snarled.

'How should I know?' Whitebait retorted. 'I'm an artist, I don't know anything about politics, all I know is that I don't like the working class. That's why I let Guelph and Chibelline lace my cunt with LSD before they get various yobs to lick me out. Once these oiks are tripping, I fill their lungs with concrete and leave it to set, before performing an autopsy to retrieve my artwork. Guelph and Chibelline have been very helpful in providing me with sculptural subjects, so don't bother asking me about their politics because I don't know anything about it!'

 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Yes, I mean something by it. That natural disaster itself is a theological - pseudo-religious term.
I dunno, it seems fairly useful to distinguish between disasters that humans have had something to do with from disasters they haven't. It's only "religious" if you call it an "act of God", which probably everyone other than Richard Dawkins understands is a figure of speech, anyway.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
I dunno, it seems fairly useful to distinguish between disasters that humans have had something to do with from disasters they haven't. It's only "religious" if you call it an "act of God", which probably everyone other than Richard Dawkins understands is a figure of speech, anyway.

Disaster is a human interpretation though. It doesn't exist outside of our cognition.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
The distinction I was making with this thread, which Danny rightly picked up on and which I was arguing with Craner about elsewhere, is that this stuff isn't conspiracy theory. It's history.

It's conspiracy (in the mafia mold) but not conspiracy theory. Which was my point. They operate on different terrains. conspiracy theories are for sad oxford junkies and their relatives, exactly the people who one should expect to be least susceptible to conspiracism.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
I was just thinking that, reading those quotes.

Oh it's bad, really really bad. don't get me wrong. But pulp skinhead fiction is like that. The playboy magazines of literature, which is precisely why its interesting. The man clearly could write properly, but he chooses not to. Why he doesn't is interesting.
 

version

Well-known member
It's conspiracy (in the mafia mold) but not conspiracy theory. Which was my point. They operate on different terrains. conspiracy theories are for sad oxford junkies and their relatives, exactly the people who one should expect to be least susceptible to conspiracism.
This is the wedge I was trying to drive between the two threads and which Luke kicked out earlier. As Craner said of Gladio, it's not a conspiracy theory, it's the history of a conspiracy.
 
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