How Goes The Plebe War?
I don't disagree with Marx in my view that the objective of the gentry is to make life miserable for the workers. The question has always been precisely how to do this and how far to go. Under the worst despots, the explicit goal is to depopulate them, and this is effectively what's going on in Ukraine, although programs to encourage abortion, transsexualism, and disintegration of families in the more genteel west differ only in degree. As with other worldwide conflicts, each theater has unique conditions.
As I said Sunday, I think the current war broke out with the Wuhan COVID lab leak sometime in the autum of 2019. The pandemic almost certainly came from that lab leak, although the full set of circumstances may never be fully understood -- it does seem likely that the work that led to the leak was funded in China by US gentry interests via prominent bureaucrats and academics and was intended to develop lethal strains of bat viruses for reasons never made clear. Anything really new here?
The same clique of prominent bureaucrats and academics appears to have seized opportunistically on the lab leak to impose a radical program of unprecedented social control involving lockdowns, social distance, prohibited gatherings, non-essential activites, masks, and compulsory vaccinations. This quickly became a worldwide phenomenon. It ended eventually as the virus strain weakened, while at the same time the radical social controls proved unable to control the virus's spread.
In hindsight -- as a priest noted just in last Sunday's homily -- a key part of the effort was to discourage religious observance by declaring church services "non-essential" and prohibiting attendance or limiting it to token gatherings. Due to the effort of observant Christians and Jews in the US, this was an early part of the campaign that failed via a US Supreme Court ruling. I think it's also significant that Ukraine President Zelensky has cited his country's religious history in his speeches rallying his people, and Pope Francis and US Catholics are prominent in supporting Ukraine, which has a substantial Catholic minority.
Contemporary with the original social control program was an alliance between the gentry and the Lumpenproletariat, the criminal class, to foster riots and social disorder. This was oddly incongruous, a program on one hand to keep the workers under near universal curfew while giving petty criminals and their enablers among the radical gentry free rein to burn and loot.
This was not a Marxist alliance -- Marx himself understood that the Lumpenproletariat is not a relilable ally for anyone, certainly not the workers, and the alliance itself was fairly brief. It was also based on the idea of conflating minorities with the Lumpenproletariat, which was insulting to the minorities in any long term. It was useful as a factor that led to the defeat of Trump in the 2020 election, but by early 2022, the Democrats understood that the Black Lives Matter and Defund the Police movements were a liability for the upcoming midterms and explicitly disavowed them.
This was the second retreat from the gentry's 2020 program, following the gradual withdrawal of COVID social controls. The related phenomenon of Critical Race Theory in public schools is being defeated piecemeal in local campaigns by parents against school boards, but founded on the same flawed idea of an alliance between the gentry and the Lumpenproletariat, it is doomed eventually to full defeat.
This has effectively left two surviving elements of the program, the elimination of fossil fuels in the name of climate change and transsexualism. The effect of the Russo-Ukraine War and sanctions against Russian oil and gas has had the initial result of raising fuel prices above anything the gentry could have wished for, but this is clearly setting the stage for a major political confrontation that will likely end in the same way as the COVID social controls or the BLM riots; the gentry will eventually be forced to disavow the program.
The last survivor will likely be transsexualism. It's hard to understand why the gentry has been clinging so tightly to this program, since transsexuals are a tiny part of the electorate, while their effort has clearly been to proselytize for it as widely as they can. It is now included in US military training materials, and the battle is now engaged to eliminate it from elementary school curricula, where the gentry clearly wish to include it.
It's noteworthy, though, that the most prominent public models are currently an Ivy League male swimmer competing as a woman, and Dr Rachel Levine, a biological male awarded Woman of the Year by USA Today. An Ivy Leaguer and a bureaucrat, clearly instances of gentry self-promotion. And it's worth mentioning once again that neither climate change nor transsexualism was ever part of the Marxist program.
The Plebe War is not going well for them.
