Pomo's Inside-Out, Upside-Down World of Moral Inversion

The forces of Postmodern rhetoric have now produced an opus that harbours within its bosom all the applications language has to offer by way turning the truth on its head.

Collating, moral inversion, equivocation, false analogy and equivalence, metaphor as reality, fibs, demagogy, innuendo, gossip, sophistry, suggestion, fake indignation, projection, grand lies, hysteria.

The entire horror cabinet of Postmodern lingo is harnessed in the effort to convince the half educated, the badly informed, the indoctrinated, the lobotomized, and the brain-dead of the real truth of base lies ... all compiled in what may be the literary style figure of the future, Wiki form.

Who thought that Adolf Hitler was the straw man of history, playing the part of the lowest moral pit that man can stoop to, or that justice had finally caught up with the likes of Rousseau enactors Stalin, Lenin and Pol Pot had better think again! All along it were the perfide Brits - incarnated in the person of the old buldog, Sir Winston Churchill - who are the real bad, black dogs of history!

Read Signandsight, feuilletoning "The New Republic"

"Seldom was a book more vigorously excoriated than Nicholson Baker's pacifist polemic "Human Smoke" (excerpt) which questions the justification of the allied war against the Nazis, at the hands of Gulag historian Anne Applebaum. She lashes out on two fronts: firstly against Baker's book; and secondly against what she considers to be the rampant lack of seriousness in the Internet where conspiracy theories are fabricated from bits of information patched together from Google and Wikipedia. And Baker is a Wikipedia fan, as he recently emphasised in the New York Review of Books.

Applebaum has the following to say about the book: "You cannot disagree with Baker's argument, because no argument has been made. Baker does not build a case, he insinuates something, leaving the reader to guess what. My best paraphrase of his view goes like this: Churchill was a bully and a drunk. The Roosevelts were snobs and anti-Semites. Therefore they were not good people. Therefore their so-called 'good' war must have been hypocritical. Therefore they could only have been fighting because they were in hock to the military industrial complex and they had a bloodthirsty fondness for bombing raids." And so on... >>>

Nothing beats what passes for pomo logic: because American politicians of thirty years ago had a mild preference for the depravity of Saddam over the vileness of Iran, the Iraqis must forever suffer under Saddam's misdeeds (or something ...)

The New Republic: "The Blog of War," by Anne Applebaum

Human Smoke: "The Beginnings of World War II, the End of
Civilization," by Nicholson Baker

Certainly there was no precise moment of revelation. On the contrary, it took me a long time to understand Human Smoke in any sense at all. For Baker's book really is a series of pretentious, Gawker-like vignettes, composed in the style of the pastiche I have written above. Each has a source, carefully listed in the back of the book. Most
feature a person, often famous, always carefully identified ("Hermann Goering, the second in command in the Nazi party"). Most include, portentously, a date ("It was January 7, 1939"), which at times gives the book the feel of a space-shuttle countdown. (...) >>>

Actually, it reminded me of something I recently wrote in a draft essay. Here's a sneak preview:

"Time and again these commentators express their surprise of postmodernism ending up on a par with Nazi, Fascist or extreme Nationalist ideas, expressing their shock, shock at postmodernist involvement in Nazi scandals, or anti-philosophes suddenly spouting crypto Fascist propaganda. Richard Wolin admits that the postmodern assault on reason familiarly rings of the standard European reactionary critique as traditionally expressed by the anti-modernists [Richard Wolin, "The Seduction of Unreason: The Intellectual Romance with Fascism from Nietzsche to Postmodernism", Princeton University Press, 2004, Introduction p. 12]. "

Wolin builds a good case, to which results from recent research might also be added. Surprised? Not really. All such malignant forms of state collectivism are reducible to the usual suspects.

- Filed on Articles in "The Dystopia of Paradise" and "Postmodernism: Rhetoric, Attitudes, Tactics" -