02-09-2017, 05:05 PM
Now this from The Nation yesterday:
"Steve Bannon Wants To Start World War III"
His 2009 film, Generation Zero, shows a hellishly bleak vision of our past, present, and future, driven by a magical belief in historical determinism.
Here is the link to the full article: https://www.thenation.com/article/steve-...d-war-iii/
I cite a few (noncontiguous) passages, beginning about midway through the article:
...there is one Bannon production that deserves more attention for what it explains about his underlying worldview: his 2010 movie Generation Zero. In 90 minutes of often lurid images from the last hundred years of world history, interspersed with interviews with a seemingly never-ending array of conservative intellectuals, nearly all of them white men, Bannon’s script offers a coherent and hellishly bleak vision of our past, present, and future, driven by a magical belief in historical determinism...
I interject with a question here: Has anyone else watched Generation Zero? If so, what did you think of it?
...To Bannon, and the parade of conservatives he marshals to make his case (Newt Gingrich, Heather MacDonald, Roger Kimball, Michael Novak, and Shelby Steele all get lots of face time), the rebellions of the 1960s were all rooted in the baby-boom generation’s narcissism. Not once do racism or the Vietnam War appear as possible causes for mass movements for social change or human liberation. Instead, the left—represented by organizer Saul Alinsky and academics Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward—is blamed for manipulating the children of the 1960s into believing that American society was evil and that disruption of the status quo was moral. Only if you ignore the proximate causes of protest, like racism or war, can you make this sort of intellectual leap. But Bannon is just warming up.
One quarter of the way into [i]Generation Zero, the filmmaker unveils the deeper theory that guides his thinking: the notion of generational turnings popularized by authors Neil Howe and William Strauss in their books Generations: The History of America’s Future (1991) and The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy (1997). According to Strauss and Howe, roughly every 80 years—a saeculum, or the average life-span of a person—America goes through a cataclysmic crisis. Marked by savagery and genocide, and lasting a decade or more, this crisis ends with a reset of the social order and its survivors all vowing never to let such a catastrophe happen again...[/i]
...In a [i]Time magazine article published shortly after November’s election, David Kaiser explains why this is so chilling. Bannon had sought to interview him for Generation Zero because he is one of the few professional historians who have taken Howe and Strauss’s work seriously. As he writes, “My own interpretation of [their work] is that the death of an old political, economic and social order creates an opportunity for any determined movement or leader to put a new vision in place.” The Republican Party, he says, has such a vision, while the Democrats have been more concerned with protecting the achievements of the New Deal.
But Bannon, Kaiser says, had more on his mind than merely rolling back the legacies of Democratic presidents from Barack Obama to Lyndon Johnson and Franklin Roosevelt...[/i]
...Bannon doesn’t just believe that we are in an existential conflict with Islam or with China. It seems he wants to exacerbate those conflicts into a new world war. As a believer in Strauss and Howe’s theory of history, Bannon fantasizes that he can use that cataclysm to forge a completely new order. He is now in a position to make that a reality.
I'm no fan of Donald Trump, as I have indicated time and again. And to some extent, Steve Bannon seems to pose more of a risk to liberal democracy in America than does Trump. But at the ripe age of 62 years, I've learned to take predictions of catastrophe (World War III) with a yuge grain of salt. Attention must be paid in times of crisis, but is Bannon really playing Iago to Trump's Othello, as articles like this insinuate? Is Trump of one accord with Bannon's worldview about existential conflict with Islam and/or with China? What measures would the Trump administration have to take to make any of us conclude--and rightfully fear--that, yes, Bannon is steering us toward a geopolitical cataclysm, as a self-fulfillment of Fourth Turning prophecy?
"Steve Bannon Wants To Start World War III"
His 2009 film, Generation Zero, shows a hellishly bleak vision of our past, present, and future, driven by a magical belief in historical determinism.
Here is the link to the full article: https://www.thenation.com/article/steve-...d-war-iii/
I cite a few (noncontiguous) passages, beginning about midway through the article:
...there is one Bannon production that deserves more attention for what it explains about his underlying worldview: his 2010 movie Generation Zero. In 90 minutes of often lurid images from the last hundred years of world history, interspersed with interviews with a seemingly never-ending array of conservative intellectuals, nearly all of them white men, Bannon’s script offers a coherent and hellishly bleak vision of our past, present, and future, driven by a magical belief in historical determinism...
I interject with a question here: Has anyone else watched Generation Zero? If so, what did you think of it?
...To Bannon, and the parade of conservatives he marshals to make his case (Newt Gingrich, Heather MacDonald, Roger Kimball, Michael Novak, and Shelby Steele all get lots of face time), the rebellions of the 1960s were all rooted in the baby-boom generation’s narcissism. Not once do racism or the Vietnam War appear as possible causes for mass movements for social change or human liberation. Instead, the left—represented by organizer Saul Alinsky and academics Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward—is blamed for manipulating the children of the 1960s into believing that American society was evil and that disruption of the status quo was moral. Only if you ignore the proximate causes of protest, like racism or war, can you make this sort of intellectual leap. But Bannon is just warming up.
One quarter of the way into [i]Generation Zero, the filmmaker unveils the deeper theory that guides his thinking: the notion of generational turnings popularized by authors Neil Howe and William Strauss in their books Generations: The History of America’s Future (1991) and The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy (1997). According to Strauss and Howe, roughly every 80 years—a saeculum, or the average life-span of a person—America goes through a cataclysmic crisis. Marked by savagery and genocide, and lasting a decade or more, this crisis ends with a reset of the social order and its survivors all vowing never to let such a catastrophe happen again...[/i]
...In a [i]Time magazine article published shortly after November’s election, David Kaiser explains why this is so chilling. Bannon had sought to interview him for Generation Zero because he is one of the few professional historians who have taken Howe and Strauss’s work seriously. As he writes, “My own interpretation of [their work] is that the death of an old political, economic and social order creates an opportunity for any determined movement or leader to put a new vision in place.” The Republican Party, he says, has such a vision, while the Democrats have been more concerned with protecting the achievements of the New Deal.
But Bannon, Kaiser says, had more on his mind than merely rolling back the legacies of Democratic presidents from Barack Obama to Lyndon Johnson and Franklin Roosevelt...[/i]
...Bannon doesn’t just believe that we are in an existential conflict with Islam or with China. It seems he wants to exacerbate those conflicts into a new world war. As a believer in Strauss and Howe’s theory of history, Bannon fantasizes that he can use that cataclysm to forge a completely new order. He is now in a position to make that a reality.
I'm no fan of Donald Trump, as I have indicated time and again. And to some extent, Steve Bannon seems to pose more of a risk to liberal democracy in America than does Trump. But at the ripe age of 62 years, I've learned to take predictions of catastrophe (World War III) with a yuge grain of salt. Attention must be paid in times of crisis, but is Bannon really playing Iago to Trump's Othello, as articles like this insinuate? Is Trump of one accord with Bannon's worldview about existential conflict with Islam and/or with China? What measures would the Trump administration have to take to make any of us conclude--and rightfully fear--that, yes, Bannon is steering us toward a geopolitical cataclysm, as a self-fulfillment of Fourth Turning prophecy?