Хорошо забытое старое

[tijd]

Джон Кемени был одним из " марсиан" (еврейских иммигрантов из Венгрии, которые внесли неоценимый вклад в развитие науки и техники XX века). Он вошел в историю, как один из создателей языка программирования BASIC. Оказавшись в молодом возрасте на посту президента Дартмутского колледжа, Кемени превратил его в один из центров обучения молодой тогда компьютерной науке. При нем Дартмут перестал быть чисто мужским заведением и претерпел другие изменения в ногу со временем.

John George Kemeny was born in Hungary on May 31, 1926, and immigrated to the United States with his parents in 1940.
Widely praised by his colleagues for both the depth and the breadth of his intellect, Dr. Kemeny was selected a year after his graduation from Princeton University to be a research assistant to Albert Einstein, and he passed the first milestones of his academic career while still remarkably young. He earned a doctorate in mathematics from Princeton at 23, was made a full professor of mathematics at Dartmouth at 27, was appointed chairman of the mathematics department there at 29 and was named president of Dartmouth at 43.
He served as president for 11 years, until 1981, when he resigned to return to teaching. But his most lasting contribution may have been as co-inventor of the Basic computer language, one of the most widely used in the world. Basic (for Beginner's All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) provided the intellectual building blocks for many later forms of software and is still a major tool in teaching computer programming.
https://www.nytimes.com/1992/12/27/us/john-kemeny-66-computer-pioneer-and-educator.html



В 1980 Кемени произнес речь, которая продолжает резонировать в наше время.

In his commencement address last June, Dr. Kemeny warned the new graduates against "a voice heard in many guises throughout history, which is the most dangerous voice you will ever hear."
"It appeals to the basest instincts in all of us; it appeals to human prejudice," he said. "It tries to divide us by setting whites against blacks, by setting Chistians against Jews, by setting men against women. And if it succeeds in dividing us from our fellow human beings, it will impose its evil will upon a fragmented society."
https://www.nytimes.com/1981/10/13/us/conservative-paper-stirs-dartmouth.html



Его слова были неявно обращены в адрес организованного в том году скандального консервативного издания The Dartmouth Review. Кемени сожалел, что перед уходом в отставку с поста президента университета не смог вынудить это издание убрать слово "Dartmouth" из своего названия.

"The trouble with The Dartmouth Review is that it is highly financed by outsiders. It's really not aimed at the campus. They don't sell it on campus; they distribute it freely on campus. There have [been] very large subventions, some from alumni sources but I understand a substantial amount from non-alumni sources, simply to spread an ultraconservative view. They seem to be willing to go to almost any extreme for sensationalism.
Two faculty members stormed into my office about being totally misquoted in the paper, and when they called in the editor in charge, they said, "But look, you talked to us. You know this isn't true, this isn't true, this isn't true." And the answer he is supposed to have given to them was, "We don't care what the truth is. We're trying to propagate a certain position and we'll make any statement that will help advance that cause." They were just absolutely outrageous students. They thought maybe they had gotten it wrong, but they didn't see how. But this admission of what amounted to intentional lying shocked them.
That was a new element. The major issue I was concerned about was that they should not be allowed to use the Dartmouth name. That was probably as badly mishandled during my term as president as any issue whatsoever. I had before and afterwards had occasion to know that dealing with lawyers is not easy. One would get totally contradictory advice.
For a while Ralph Manuel tried. He thought he was dealing with reasonable people and tried to work out some sort of compromise, but I think Ralph would say that it became clear before the end of it, they had absolutely no intention whatsoever of reaching a reasonable deal. As a matter of fact, there's nothing they would have loved more than the college suing them because of all the publicity it would get them.
We did manage to stop one thing. They incorporated as a not for profit organization under the name Dartmouth Review in the state of New Hampshire. We forced them to change that because to raise funds under a name that has Dartmouth in it would give people the impression that somehow they are connected with the college. We also forced them to have in some letters on the front page saying that they had no official connection with Dartmouth College.
But I really wanted to have them sued simply to take the word Dartmouth out of the title of it. I made it clear to them if they wanted to be called The College Review or The Hanover Review or any other name that they wished that didn't have Dartmouth in it, they would have every right and I would never again… never hear a word from me. But it didn't happen, and lawyers took forever.
What happened, it finally, after what seemed to me much too long preparation and waiting too long-and here is an issue where the longer you wait, the harder it is-a case was prepared for the board for a suit. Cary Clark [‘62], our chief legal officer at the meeting, made his presentation, and then a trustee asked, "What do you think our chances are of success," and he said, "Sixty-forty against it," at which point the board sort of lost interest in suing. I personally believe that was a mistake, that the suit should have been made whether we won it or not, at least to make a public statement that the college disassociated itself from what The Dartmouth Review was doing.
These things happened when I was a lame duck president. I think that in no other area did the lame duckness affect me, but this was probably one area where it did."
https://www.dartmouth.edu/library/rauner/archives/oral_history/kemeny/index.html



Крестным отцом The Darthmouth Review был Джеффри Харт, профессор английского языка и консервативный мыслитель. Его сын стал первым редактором.

Харт родился в один год с Норманам Подгорецом. Как и Подгорец, он вырос в Бруклине и учился на том же факультете в Колумбийском университете. И, хотя он был из обеспеченной семьи, не был евреем и не сдвигался слева направо, но говорил, что хорошо понимает чувства, которые охватывали Подгореца при общении с либеральной тусовкой.

"Podhoretz came to Columbia from near poverty in Brooklyn; I came there via Stuyvesant High School, from the suburbs in Queens. The only Communist I knew before Stuyvesant was an out-of-work architect like my father, whom my father would invite of a Saturday so as to be able to “share the wealth,” meaning cocktails. At Stuyvesant and around Union Square there were plenty of fascinating Communists, who engaged in doctrinal disputes as complex as any in the Talmud. The Communists at Stuyvesant had never met an intelligent gentile and regarded me affectionately as a sort of unicorn. At Columbia, though we both experienced the intellectual power of the Family, I remained rather outside the intensities that roiled it. At the end of this book, looking back, Podhoretz writes with a sense of poignant loss, despite the personal agons, and I can certainly understand what he feels."
https://www.nationalreview.com/2004/06/family-man-jeffrey-hart/

В конце 1960ых Харт подрабатывал спичрайтером для борцов с либеральной заразой 1960ых - губернатора Калифорнии Рейгана и кандидата в президенты Никсона.



В 1975 Джеффри Харт написал хвалебную рецензию на книгу "Le Camp des Saints". Харт писал, что то, что критики называют "расизмом", на самом деле всего лишь здоровая самозащитная реакция западного общества.

"But what is racism? Most people do not now and have not in the past subscribed to esoteric theories regarding the superiority of this or that race. Most people, however, are able to perceive that the “other group” looks rather different and lives rather differently from their own. Such ‘racist” or “ethnocentric” feelings are undoubtedly healthy, and involve merely a preference for one’s own culture and kind. Indeed - and Raspail hammers away at this point throughout his novel-no group can long survive unless it does “prefer itself.” One further point is implicit. The liberal rote anathema on “racism” is in effect a poisonous assault upon Western self-preference."
https://sanseverything.wordpress.com/2015/02/20/genocide-as-sanity-and-cultural-health-national-review-on-india/

В последние годы книга стала особенно популярна среди современных расистов и нацистов, сторонников теории заговора про " белый геноцид".

The Camp of the Saints has long been influential in organized white supremacy. “In 2011, the book started to get really popular in white nationalist circles,” Ryan Lenz, a senior investigative reporter for the Southern Poverty Law Center, told me. He compared its influence to that of the infamous The Turner Diaries, which imagines a race war that obliterates all non-whites and Jews. “And the reason for this,” Lenz explained, “is that in the early teens-in 2010, 2011, 2012-the idea of white genocide became very popular in the white nationalist news.”
Raspail’s fear-that a weak West will be easy prey for the ravenous East and South-fits neatly into white nationalist rhetoric. “The premise of Camp of the Saints plays directly into that idea of white genocide,” Lenz continued. “It is the idea that through immigration, if it’s left unchecked, the racial character and content of a culture can be undermined to the point of oblivion.”
https://newrepublic.com/article/146925/notorious-book-ties-right-far-right



В 1982 ассоциация с Dartmouth Review замедлила утверждение в Сенате Харта, назначенного Рейганом в National Council on the Humanities, но не помешала этому утверждению.

In his questions, Senator Kennedy had asked Professor Hart to discuss a newspaper column in which he wrote: "On the American college campus there exists a widespread suspicion that on admissions, grades, scholarships and so on, minorities are getting much more than their due, and this is resented. Assertions and demands made by minorities were at one time swallowed whole. In today's climate they will be greeted skeptically and they will meet with resistance."
Mr. Hart replied that the passage referred to "the fact that college students today resent special treatment for minorities." He defended the statement's accuracy.
In a Review article last spring, a student wrote, in what was taken to be an imitation of black dialect: "Dese boys be sayin' dat we be comin' here to Dartmut' and not takin' the classics. You know, Homa, Shakesphere; but I hes' dey all be co'd in da ground, six feet unda, and watcha be askin' us to learn from dem? We be culturally 'lightened, too.'"
In his response, Professor Hart said that The Review was an independent student newspaper and that he had "no foreknowledge of what is going into it."
https://www.nytimes.com/1982/09/13/us/way-eased-for-humanities-nominee.html



Успех The Dartmoth Review, созданного в 1980, вдохновил 19-летнего Питера Тиля на создание в 1986 The Stanford Review.

Есть определенная историческая ирония в том, что в 2016 Тиль разорил конгломерат изданий Gawker Media в отместку за то, что они раскрыли его гомосексуальность, в то время, как раскрытие гомосексуальности студентов против их желания было любимым скандальным занятием The Dartmoth Review.



Этими подвигами прославились, в частности, студенты Дартмута (и одно время любовники) Лора Ингрэм, ныне один из рупоров Fox News, и Динеш Д'Суза, ныне скандальный пропагандист, посаженный по уголовной статье за мошенничество на выборах и помилованный Трампом.

She went to Dartmouth University and became the first female editor of the conservative ‘Dartmouth Review’, where conservative author Dinesh D’Souza, a former boyfriend, also worked. While there, she secretly sent a reporter with a tape recorder to a campus gay students association meeting; she then outed the students in print and sent tapes of the meetings to the students’ parents. In the magazine she called association members “cheerleaders for latent campus sodomites.”
https://mic.com/articles/188731/laura-ingrahams-long-history-of-controversial-behavior

Впрочем, издатели The Stanford Review тоже не отставали.

Thiel wasn’t always so willing to discard his principles, though. Early in his career, he defended a fellow Stanford student (and future business partner) who had screamed “Faggot! Faggot! Hope you die of AIDS!” and “Can’t wait until you die, faggot!” to provoke college administrators, and decried the “punishment” of that student, which Thiel said at the time was designed to deter speech.
In January 1992, when Thiel was a third-year law student at Stanford Law School, a first-year law student named Keith Rabois shouted the epithets quoted above (as well as “Go ahead-try to kick me out of housing!”) in the direction of the on-campus residence of a Stanford lecturer named Dennis Matthies. Rabois later said his comments, though directed at Matthies, “were mostly about faggots being bad in general” and otherwise intended to challenge what he saw as Stanford’s overly restrictive rules regarding student speech. <...>
After the Stanford administration publicized the incident, Rabois came under intense criticism not only for his comments, which could be easily interpreted as a death threat, but his own defense of his comments, in which he seemed to suggest that gay people were a danger to children and that gay sex, rather than years of willful neglect by public officials, was the primary reason for the rapid spread of H.I.V. The outcry eventually led Rabois to transfer to Harvard Law School, from which he graduated in 1994.
Throughout all of this, Rabois had a steadfast ally in Peter Thiel, who co-founded Stanford’s conservative journal, The Stanford Review, as an undergraduate in 1987. It’s unclear what Thiel wrote about the incident at the time it happened, since the Review’s online archives only go back to 1999 and the Stanford Library’s collection of the Review’s 1992 issues is currently unavailable online. But the year after Rabois graduated from Harvard, Thiel co-authored a book called The Diversity Myth: Multiculturalism and Political Intolerance on Campus, in which he defended Rabois’ actions at length.
https://gawker.com/the-free-speech-peter-thiel-will-defend-faggot-faggo-1779486823

In the old days I had breakfast with Nixon and worked for Reagan in the White House. Trump, like those men, is larger than life. He contains multitudes pic.twitter.com/xbaEz04Gkw
- Dinesh D'Souza (@DineshDSouza) November 7, 2019

Есть некоторая ирония и в том, что Динешу Д'Суза, представителю темнокожих индийских иммигрантов, нашествием которых пугал "Le Camp des Saints",  предстояло стать самым известным дартмутским троллем. Имено перу Д'Сузы принадлежала, в частности, упомянутая выше статья на ломаном английским с попыткой передразнивания диалекта американских негров.

D’Souza was an editor at the Dartmouth Review when it published a notorious piece in 1982 with the headline “Dis sho’ ain’t no jive, bro.” It announced, “Today, the ‘ministration be slashin’ dem free welfare lunches for us po’ students. How we ‘posed to be getting’ our GPAs up when we don’t be havin’ no food?” Among its other accomplishments, the paper defended Dartmouth’s Indian symbol, obsessively targeted William Cole, a black music professor for, among other things, his alleged “deficient academic standards,” and, in 1984, at the behest of then-editor Laura Ingraham, secretly taped and published a transcript of a meeting of the Gay Students Association.
Despite-or more likely because of-all this, the alumni of the review essentially had an open entrée into the conservative establishment. Gregory Fossedal, who was the editor-in-chief, became an editorial writer for the Wall Street Journal and a prominent advocate of Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, known as Star Wars. At age 25, Ben Hart wrote a book called Poisoned Ivy, a memoir of his years at Dartmouth, and was director of studies at The Heritage Foundation, where he also spearheaded Third Generation, a program that cultivated young conservatives and tried to boost their careers. And then there was D’Souza, who in 1983 became editor of Prospect, a magazine published by the Concerned Alumni of Princeton. He also wrote a biography of the Rev. Jerry Falwell and contributed to various conservative magazines.
Next, he launched his career in Washington under the tutelage of Adam Meyerson, the talented editor of Policy Review, a magazine that featured lengthy essays by leading conservative thinkers. There, D’Souza made a name for himself on topics that ran from a discussion of the political philosopher Leo Strauss-he noted that Strauss and his students used “the philosophy of natural right to defend liberal democracy and moral values against their adversaries”-to a friendly examination of The New Republic that chided it for not being more consistently right wing. In 1986, he worked as a domestic policy analyst in the White House for Gary Bauer, a prominent social conservative whom Trump just appointed to the board of the U.S. National Commission on Religious Freedom.
Then, in the 1990s, as a research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute-yet another pillar of the GOP establishment-D’Souza produced two big and controversial books. The first, Illiberal Education, suggested that the university had become a venue for a “cultural Olympics” where students congregated in “ethnic platoons” and professors preached various forms of “racial indoctrination aimed at teaching young people not how to think, but what to think.” It was greeted with hosannas in the right-wing press and with approbation by more liberal publications such as The New Republic.
Then, in 1995, he published a book called The End of Racism. In it, he called for repeal of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and argued, “Given the intensity of black rage and its appeal to a wide constituency, whites are right to be nervous. Black rage is a response to black suffering and failure, and reflects the irresistible temptation to attribute African American problems to a history of white racist oppression.” These lucubrations marked a turning point for D’Souza. It was published the same year as Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father and got vastly more attention at the time. Sam Tanenhaus, the former editor of the New York Times Book Review who interviewed D’Souza for The New Republic in 2014, told me in an email, “in that moment Dinesh was by far the better-known figure of the two-indeed the most illustrious young literary conservative in America. Well, that changed most emphatically. His position and Obama’s were reversed. I think this shocked Dinesh and confused him. This may explain the nearly pornographic quality of his later books and films. They are attempts not just to expose Obama, but to drag him through the mud-parallel to Trump’s own vulgar attacks.”
Indeed, whether it was declaring on Twitter about Obama, “YOU CAN TAKE THE BOY OUT OF THE GHETTO…Watch this vulgar man show his stuff, while America cowers in embarrassment,” or calling Rosa Parks an “OVERRATED DEMOCRAT,” D’Souza showed that he had mastered the smear technique that his presidential benefactor has also amply deployed against real and perceived enemies. As Trump prepares to pardon D’Souza, the two emerge as unlikely doppelgangers, at least when it comes to the art of vilification.
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/05/31/dinesh-dsouza-pardon-donald-trump-218583/

This is Blake Neff, Tucker Carlson’s former head writer. Why does these ”master race” guys always look like this? pic.twitter.com/tvmQuTrNgh
- Timothy Kachler (@kachler) July 11, 2020

Хотя доля заслуженной славы может перепасть и представилям более молодого поколения среди сотрудников The Dartmouth Review ь уволенному с Fox News Блэйку Неффу или уволенному из органов разведки Майклу Эллису.

On the eve of President Joe Biden’s inauguration, former President Donald Trump appointed Michael Ellis ’06 to serve as the top lawyer for the National Security Administration - a typically apolitical role. Trump’s midnight bid to appoint Ellis, who has led a controversial career as White House senior director for intelligence and senior associate counsel to Trump, drew immediate criticism from government officials and experts, and the Biden administration has since placed Ellis on leave pending an investigation into his selection for the role.
As an undergraduate, Ellis was editor-in-chief of The Dartmouth Review. During his tenure, he wrote numerous divisive opinion pieces, including an article defending then-Harvard University president Larry Summers for “suggest[ing] [that] perhaps the sexes’ brains may function in different ways.” Under Ellis’s leadership, the Review also published an editorial that compared modern affirmative action policies to Dartmouth’s anti-Semitic admissions policies of the 1920s.
https://www.thedartmouth.com/article/2021/02/gaylord-michael-ellis



В 1986 - год основания The Stanford Review - происходили другие нашумевшие события, связавшие два университета.

Сотрудники The Dartmouth Review организовали нападение на деревянные постройки, воздвигнутые студенческими активистами, которые протестовали против режима апартеида в ЮАР и призывали к его бойкоту.

As college pranks go, it was on a grand scale: a dozen Dartmouth students drove a flatbed truck to the campus green at 3 a.m. after the Martin Luther King holiday. With sledgehammers, they attacked a small shantytown erected in protest against South African apartheid.
As walls came crashing down, two female students sleeping there to guard the four shacks ran out in their long underwear, terrified, and called police.
The incident has thrown this 217-year-old Ivy League college into an uproar, sparking a 30-hour takeover of an administration building, a bitter confrontation with the school's president and the first suspension of classes for a political teach-in since the 1960s.
It has also focused attention on the tactics of campus conservatives. Ten of the 12 students charged in the attack are members of the Dartmouth Review, a weekly newspaper that has been an incubator for the New Right.
Graduates of the Review, whose members specialize in imaginative guerrilla warfare against affirmative action, feminism and homosexuality, are at work in the Reagan White House, at the Heritage Foundation and on the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal.
"This was a vile, destructive act," said Prof. Thomas B. Roos, a faculty leader. "It was brown-shirt bullying on the order of Kristallnacht," the night in 1938 when the Nazis burned down Jewish shops and synagogues.
While 200 students occupied the main administration building Wednesday night, giving speeches about campus racism and singing "We Shall Overcome," the alleged culprits at the Review offices were unrepentant.
Snacking on milk and cookies, with pictures of former president Richard M. Nixon on the wall, they said their "Dartmouth Committee to Beautify the Green Before Winter Carnival" took up sledgehammers "to restore pride and sparkle to the college we love so much."
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1986/01/24/students-ruin-antiapartheid-shantytown/81a5e3e6-24c3-4cff-b2df-ee427ab494b4/

Похожие событие происходили в это время и в Стэнфорде, хотя и с меньшим резонансом.

The Stanford University police today were investigating the destruction of a campus shantytown symbolizing the plight of South African blacks.
Three huts of cardboard, wood and plastic were erected by a student group, Stanford Out of South Africa, to protest the school's investments in companies doing business in South Africa. The huts were seen standing late Saturday by a security officer, but they had been flattened when the officer passed by three hours later, said Capt. Raoul Niemeyer of the Stanford police. "Typically, we have a lot of vandalism over the weekend," Captain Niemeyer said. "We don't know if this was politically motivated."
Steve Phillips, president of the Black Student Union, called the destruction "racist," saying it showed "a total disregard for those people struggling to aid the people of South Africa."
https://www.nytimes.com/1986/02/12/us/dartmouth-suspends-12-for-attack-on-shanties.html



Накануне выборов 2016 бывшая студентка Стэнфорда (ныне автор популярных книг о воспитании детей) поделилась воспоминанием тридцатилетней давности о разговоре с Питером Тилем про апартеид в то время, когда они жили в одном студенческом общежитии.

“Gotta say I wasn’t surprised when tech billionaire Peter Thiel endorsed Trump. Peter and I were dormmates at Stanford freshman year, and while I barely knew him - we ran in different circles - his fiercely Libertarian views were often a topic of conversation among those of us living in Branner Hall. One day I heard a rumor that Peter defended apartheid (which was then still the law of the land in South Africa), which I found morally repugnant. To know that a fellow student, a dormmate for that matter, might defend such a brutally oppressive race-based caste system gave me the willies. But I wanted to give Peter the benefit of the doubt, so I mustered the courage to go to his room to ask him about it. He said, with no facial affect, that apartheid was a sound economic system working efficiently, and moral issues were irrelevant. He made no effort to even acknowledge the pain the concept of apartheid could possibly raise for me, a Black woman. Needless to say, the chill up my spine didn’t go away that day; if anything my fear was now greater knowing I was living with someone who seemed indifferent to human suffering or felt that oppressing whole swaths of humans was a rational, justifiable element of a system of governance.”
https://medium.com/indian-thoughts/my-conversation-with-peter-thiel-about-apartheid-and-its-aftermath-3fdf4249b08d

Пунктирная линия от этого разговора до поддержки Тилем в 2016 автора сочинений "Western Civilization Is White Civilization" и "Russia is not the enemy", оказывается при ближайшем рассмотрении довольно жирной.



По официальной версии на создание The Stanford Review Тиля вдохновили дискуссии вокруг отмены в Стэнфорде обязательного курса Западной культуры.

В 2001 Джеффри Харт, создатель The Dartmouth Review, взялся за спасение страны от "культурной катастрофы" и предложил собственную версию учебника Западной культуры. Следуя определенным традициям, он представляет эту культуру, как диалектическое противостояние "Афин" и "Иерусалима".

The master narrative that seems to me to "cover the facts" has been called "Athens and Jerusalem." Those proper nouns stand for Greek philosophy, on the one hand, and, on the other, the spiritual aspiration of Jerusalem.
"Athens" stands for the view that truth is discovered through the intellect.
"Jerusalem" stands for the view that truth is delivered through the insights of recognized genius.
"Athens" stands for cognition, philosophy, and science.
"Jerusalem" stands for the spiritual aspiration to holiness, or purity of soul. <...>
In Smiling through the Cultural Catastrophe, I argue that Athens and Jerusalem remain at the core of Western Being-not Confucius, not Buddha, certainly not Mohammed. In the first part of my book I examine the foundations of Athens and Jerusalem. I begin with the Iliad and the story of Moses, two great bronze age epics of, respectively, Athens and Jerusalem. I then describe how Socrates and Jesus purified and typified the tendencies of Athens and Jerusalem, going on to consider the synthesis undertaken by Saint Paul, a rabbi (Jerusalem) who spoke Greek and was well-versed in Greek culture (Athens). In the second part of my book I examine the way the tension between Athens and Jerusalem animates the entire Western literary and intellectual tradition, discussing, among other exemplars of the Western tradition, Dante, Shakespeare, Moliere, Voltaire, Dostoeyevski, and the American, F. Scott Fitzgerald, author of The Great Gatsby.
Smiling through the Cultural Catastrophe represents a primer, an introductory course in Western civilization itself. But I also intend the book as an argument, an assertion that it is the tension between Athens and Jerusalem that generates the peculiar and powerful energy of the West. There is tension between the goal of knowing through intellect and the goal of spiritual aspiration to holiness. They are not incompatible, but they are not altogether compatible either. Off at the edge, do we place our final bet on intellect or on inspired insight that has been confirmed by experience? Both have claims. There are immensely powerful intensities behind who we actually are. And they are unique in human history.
I hope that there are 10,000 assistant professors out there in, as F. Scott Fitzgerald called it, "the dark fields of the republic," who are tired of Victim Studies, Film Studies, Cultural Studies, and other trivial ways of wasting money and time and not only wasting time but actively destroying memory.
If they read and heed my book, we can all smile through the cultural catastrophe.
https://www.hoover.org/research/what-west

Харт был последовательным в своих реакционных принципах. Отвергая неоконов и идею насаждения демократии и "смены режима" в Ираке, а также необразованных южных евангелистов в качестве базы Буша, он голосовал за Обаму на выборах 2008 и писал "In its embrace of the religious right under George W. Bush, the Republican Party became the stupid party." Впрочем, к этому времени к нему самому могла постепенно подступать деменция, от осложнений от которой он умер в 2019.



Харт считал себя анти-революционером и национал-консерватором в традициях Эдмунда Берка. В книге "Smiling through the Cultural Catastrophe" в качестве идеала общественного устройства проступает сильное национальное государство с просвещенным правиетелем вроде воспетого Гегелем Наполеона.

"Hegel taught that the idea of history is the actualization of freedom in the historical process. He traced this from the evidence of prehistoric tribes through the great archaic empires, through Athens and Rome, the Renaissance, and down to the modern state. He thought that it was in the nature of the human mind to proliferate options, hence the transformations toward freedom.
He thought that the nation-states of the Europe he knew were the highest actualization of freedom, so far. When he saw Napoleon and his army marching through Berlin toward the battle of Jena, he thought that Napoleon carried the French Enlightenment in his saddle bags and was carrying it eastward. Hegel may have been right. If Napoleon had indeed brought the Enlightenment to the darkness of the Russian steppes, who knows how history might have been changed for the better.
Hegel nowadays receives bad grades from some because of his high valuation of the nation-state. But there is much truth in his teaching. Observe what happens when the state is weak, or almost nonexistent, as in Africa and the Middle East. This results in Thomas Hobbes’s war of all against all. Life is solitary, nasty, brutish, and short."
https://www.hoover.org/research/what-west



Раннее в своей карьере к подобным просвещенным лидерам Харт относил также Муссолини.

According to Hart, Il Duce made only “a single error in judgement” (his decision to support Hitler in 1940). Other than that, everything the fascist leader did was hunky-dory. “His 1922 blackshirt march on Rome brought to an end a period of political deadlock and leftist riot,” Hart asserts. “His domestic achievements were substantial…. There was repression, the administrating of doses of castor oil, but no Gulags and Belsens or Cambodian-style slaughter….Mussolini was probably better read than any other national leader of his time…. Mussolini’s leadership made even proletarians take some pride in being Italian, and his addresses, broadcast across the Atlantic, were listened to with respect in American-Italian households…. Mussolini stood 5 feet 6 inches and had a massive, handsome head…. Mussolini liked to interrupt his working day several times with sexual intercourse, often standing up and in his uniform, a very rapid performance.” The ode to Mussolini’s character and sexual prowess ends, appropriately enough, with a quote from Ezra Pound, the fascist poet.
https://sanseverything.wordpress.com/2007/12/20/goldbergs-fascism-and-the-real-thing/



К идее просвещенной монархии склоняются нео-реакционеры из Кремниевой долины в окружении Питера Тиля. Из позабытого сочинения "An Establishment Conservative’s Guide To The Alt-Right":

"Led by philosopher Nick Land and computer scientist Curtis Yarvin, this group began a gleeful demolition of the age-old biases of western political discourse. Liberalism, democracy and egalitarianism were all put under the microscope of the neoreactionaries, who found them wanting.
Liberal democracy, they argued, had no better a historical track record than monarchy, while egalitarianism flew in the face of every piece of research on hereditary intelligence. Asking people to see each other as human beings rather than members of a demographic in-group, meanwhile, ignored every piece of research on tribal psychology.
While they can certainly be accused of being overly-eager to bridge the gap between fact and value (the truth of tribal psychology doesn’t necessarily mean we should embrace or encourage it), these were the first shoots of a new conservative ideology - one that many were waiting for."
https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2016/03/29/an-establishment-conservatives-guide-to-the-alt-right/

They made plans to meet during the July Republican National Convention. But much of Yiannopoulos’s knowledge of Thiel seemed to come secondhand from other right-wing activists, as well as Curtis Yarvin, the blogger who advocates the return of feudalism. In an email exchange shortly after the election, Yarvin told Yiannopoulos that he had been “coaching Thiel.”
“Peter needs guidance on politics for sure,” Yiannopoulos responded.
“Less than you might think!” Yarvin wrote back. “I watched the election at his house, I think my hangover lasted into Tuesday. He’s fully enlightened, just plays it very carefully.”
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/josephbernstein/heres-how-breitbart-and-milo-smuggled-white-nationalism



В своих собственных выступлениях Тиль навязчиво проводил аналогию между руководителем государства и генеральным директором компании. Поскольку общество склонно к насилию, оно постоянно пытается низвергнуть руководителя и сделать из него "сакральную жертву". Поэтому главная цель правителями - правдами и неправдами удерживаться на троне.

"How much of this can be avoided? How do you avoid becoming a sacrificial victim? The simple answer, of course, is that if you really don’t want to get killed, you shouldn’t sit on the throne. But this seems suboptimal. Wearing the crown is obviously an attractive thing. The question is whether you can decouple it with getting executed. <...>
The usual narrative is that society should be organized to cater to and reward the people who play by the rules. Things should be as easy as possible for them. But perhaps we should focus more on the people who don’t play by the rules. Maybe they are, in some key way, the most important. Maybe we should let them off the hook."
https://github.com/soulfiremedia/SoulFire/blob/master/peter-thiels-cs183-startup-class-18-notes-essay.md



Нужно заметить, что среди генеральных директоров компьютерных компаний Питер Тиль, изучавший в университете философию и юриспруденцию, выглядит так же нелепо, как Игорь Сечин, переводчик с португальского, на посту генерального директора Роснефти. Но монархов не выбирают.

Один из главных бизнес-советов Тиля - избегать соревнования и конкуренции. Он хвастался тем, что избежал конкуренции с X.com Элона Маска путем слияния компаний. Похожим образом Роснефть избежала конкуренции с компанией ЮКОС.

Тиль приводит в пример монополию Гугла, как идеальный бизнес:

"There are three steps to creating a truly valuable tech company. First, you want to find, create, or discover a new market. Second, you monopolize that market. Then you figure out how to expand that monopoly over time."
https://github.com/soulfiremedia/SoulFire/blob/master/peter-thiels-cs183-startup-class-04-notes-essay.md

Ему невдомек, что Гугл добился своего монопольного положения на рынке рынке Интернет-поиска в жесткой конкурентной борьбе и избегая слияния с конкурентами. Преимуществом Гугла в этой борьбе было не изначальное монопольное положение, а новый алгоритм, основанный на научном подходе с использованием незнакомых Тилю предметов вроде численной линейной алгебры и функционального программирования. Более того, мотивацией основателей Гугла было не банальное желание богатства и власти, а стремление улучшить для всего человечества доступ к информации.

Google's mission statement, from the outset, was "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful", and its unofficial slogan is "Don't be evil".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google



Хотя ставка Тиля на Трампа провалилась, его активное участие в американской политике продолжается. В этом году Тиль вложился в предполагаемого кандидата в сенаторы от Огайо, автора популярной книжки "Hillbilly Elegy" о страданиях бедного белого населения.

Thiel has cut a check of just over $10 million to an outside group backing J.D. Vance, the author of the bestselling book Hillbilly Elegy, a much bigger contribution than he made to support Donald Trump and Thiel’s largest disclosed political donation ever. Vance is one of several people in Thiel’s network who have weighed Senate bids in recent years and stand to benefit substantially from their ties to the billionaire investor.
The donations are the latest display of how Thiel is cultivating a network of young, populist, Ivy League-educated proteges and encouraging them to run for Senate all around the country.
Vance’s book turned him into a literary and cultural sensation after the 2016 election, especially for Democrats who were seeking clues about the working-class white voters that powered Trump to victory. The book, a memoir about Vance’s upbringing in Ohio and Kentucky, was recently made into a Netflix film.
https://www.vox.com/recode/22332045/peter-thiel-jd-vance-ohio-senate-donation

В июле 2019 Тиль и Вэнс вместе с Джошем Хаули и Такером Карлсоном участвовали в National Conservative Conference, организованной Фондом Эдмунда Берка и его руководителем Йорамом Хазони https://burke.foundation/.



В своем выступлении Тиль обозначал три ветряные мельницы, с которыми предстоит бороться: Гугл, Китай и элитные университета (вроде Стэнфорда и Йеля, в которых учились он сам, Хаули и Вэнс).

In his hourlong presentation, Thiel expressed no particular libertarian inclinations. Instead, he talked about how public policy decisions should be based on how they would better not individual lives but a collective "America" while crushing her enemies. These latter foes he named as Google, China, and the U.S. university system, advocating vigorous police actions against the first and third and a trade war (at the least) against the Middle Kingdom.
Universities, Thiel said, are spreading the virus of "cultural Marxism" while perpetrating criminal fraud by shackling students with debt that the institutions themselves should be forced to repay. (He's been railing against political correctness on campus since his days as co-founder of the right-wing student newspaper The Stanford Review in 1987.)
Silicon Valley, too, is trying to impose a monoculture of identity politics on an unwilling America, he said. Google's collaborations with Red China on artificial intelligence merit scrutiny from the CIA and FBI, who should ask executives "in a not excessively gentle manner" about their "seemingly treasonous" behavior. The day Thiel gave that speech, July 16, 2019, Trump tweeted regarding Google's supposed treason: "The Trump Administration will take a look!"
Meanwhile, Thiel said, tariffs of 25 percent on Chinese products, negotiated by representatives untainted by free trade dogma, would be a good opening bid.
https://reason.com/2020/08/02/wait-wasnt-peter-thiel-a-libertarian/

Трампизм-2.0 ищет очередного Прометея (Insider-Outsider в терминологии Тиля), который сумел бы направить популистскую энергию в правильное русло и покончить наконец с американским демократическим экспериментом.

История продолжает вращаться вокруг знакомых тем, двигаясь по спирали.