More Fallout From Traditionis Custodes And The Pope's Letter

As I predicted Sunday mornimg, there was no mention of Traditionis Custodes in that day's masses at our novus ordo parish, nor would there be any reason to mention it. Our pastor has sent no e-mails to reassure us of anything. We have a reverent OF celebration that includes professional vocalists with a small orchestra and a full organ. It's mostly all back from the lockdowns. Nobody is threatening it, and it appears that the archdiocese smiles on our rectory.

A visitor sent me the image above, which is a social media message an ordinariate priest sent to his little group, as yet still a considerable distance from being a parish. Unlike our successful parish, clearly unthreatend by Traditionis Custodes, Francis's letter is clearly the one thing that's on their minds, notwithstanding they aren't a Latin mass parish and are no more threatened than ours.

In fact, the priest goes on to say the Holy Father is "deeply, distressingly unpastoral". Just him, of course. Not speaking as a priest at all. But, er, Father, why did you use the official group mailing list to express your opinion? You're a priest 24/7. Were the Chicago priests who got busted for hanky-pank in a Miami rental car near a school acting only in their personal capacity, not as priests? Appears Cdl Cupich didn't think so. This is one reason I would not go within a mile of the ordinariate for any pastoral function, its standards for ordination are distressingly low, and we see it over and over, as we see it here.

Beyond that, I went back to the letter and re-read it carefully. Catholic commentators that I took seriously in good faith when I started as a Catholic, like Msgr Charles Pope, have called its tone "harsh", but I just don't see this. Where does Francis call anyone names? Where does he scold anyone? Where does he use abrasive or profane language? Where does he not give full explanations, fully footnoted, for his action, referring to scripture and Church authorities, in particular the Vatican II constitutions? I keep coming back to the sense I get that in fact, the traditionalists Francis identifies don't really acknowledge Vatican II, and for Francis to cite its constitutions is perhaps the big thing that's too harsh.

The problem the ordinariate priest acknowledges is, of course, that Traditionis Custodes does in fact pose "some implicit threat to our existence as ordinariate Catholics". Astonishingly, in the next sentence, he directly accuses the pope of scandal. Just him, of course. Not speaking as a priest, just some guy wearing clericals with access to the group's official mailing list. If this priest felt the need to say anything, since as he acknowledges, his group isn't affected, wouldn't just a two-sentence note suffice saying the group isn't affected, and we'll learn more about how the move affects those who are in coming weeks?

That's certainly what the US bishops are saying. Their position generally appears to be things will continue as they have while we work on this. We'll see it through. Calm down.

So the question I have is why people who aren't affected are in such a panic. The ordinariate priest, wno isn't affected, is nevertheless saying "he's talking about us in the most unpastoral way!" The people Francis is talking about are described fairly precisely:

A final reason for my decision is this: ever more plain in the words and attitudes of many is the close connection between the choice of celebrations according to the liturgical books prior to Vatican Council II and the rejection of the Church and her institutions in the name of what is called the “true Church.” One is dealing here with comportment that contradicts communion and nurtures the divisive tendency — “I belong to Paul; I belong instead to Apollo; I belong to Cephas; I belong to Christ” — against which the Apostle Paul so vigorously reacted.

In other words, he's referring to people who use the former liturgy as a totem, and we can see fairly clearly that ordinariate groups share similar totems with the Latin mass faction, such as women and girls wearing chapel veils, insisting on communion kneeling and on the tongue, and indeed, using the innovation of intinction to enforce the latter. I don't see how those totems imply anything other than "we have it right; everyone else has it wrong"; in other words, they're using them as a force for disunity.

I've certainly seen this over and over covering the North American ordinariate for nearly ten years in my former blog. In fact, without being specifically referred to or called out in any way in the pope's letter, I'm seeing an ordinariate priest recognizing that Francis, describing only a general set of attitudes, seems to be referring to him and his flock. As the saying goes, if the shoe fits, wear it.

I would guess that the ordinaries recognize this as well. If they want to stay out of the crosshairs -- because it would seem at least some of their priests understand that they qualify -- they should be acting forcefully to discourage these tendencies before higher authority moves in to do it. The problem, though, is that by doing this, they would take away what for many of their flock feel makes them special. But isn't that the point of Francis's letter?

LA County Issues Indoor Mask Order

On July 15, LA County imposed an indoor mask requirement, which took effect at midnight Saturday. Media reports like this one have been incoherent, describing on one hand the usual "sharp increase" in cases, while saying as well they're "a far cry from the winter peak that saw an average of more than 40,000 per day". Nevertheless, CNN reported that every patient now in the hospital for COVID is unvaccinated.

An issue that so far nobody has raised is that, with compliance in LA County near 100% on masking and social distance in late 2020, it had no effect, even with partial new lockdowns, on controlling the pandemic, with case rates declining only after the introduction of vaccines. If the problem is actually the unvaccinated, any type of masking, or the reimposition of any other former controls, will have no better effect than they did last year. But reimposition of former controls is exactly what the county has in mind:

[Health Officer Dr Muntu] Davis said L.A. County’s order doesn’t have an end date, and will stay in place “until we begin to see improvements in our community transmission of COVID-19."

. . . Davis said physical distancing requirements and other public health measures could also be reinstituted.

"Anything is on the table if things continue to get worse," Davis said.

The problem remains that the pandemic is essentially limited to the unvaccinated, but the entire population is being inconvenienced by ineffective controls, more of which are now pretty much guaranteed to be reimposed. County Supervisor Hilda Solis said on the Sunday talks,

[A] reimposed mask mandate in indoor public spaces is “not punishment,” but “prevention.”

. . . At the same time, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has not changed its policies to require those who are vaccinated to wear masks in public settings indoors, and the Los Angeles decision has been met with some controversy.

As shown above, Los Angeles County Sheriff Alex Villanueva posted an announcement that he will not enforce the order. (Villanueva is an elected official and able to issue policy statements in opposition to other county departments.) In addition, Ric Grenell, a former Trump operative, has filed for a temporary injunction against the order. So far, I haven't been able to find any update on the status of this case. It's being handled by Harmeet Dhillon, a San Francisco public-interest attorney who has been involved in other COVID related legal action.

The Health Officer Order impermissibly restricts the liberty of fully vaccinated individuals without rational basis or legal authority. Since March 2020, County residents have had their liberty restricted in unprecedented ways. Businesses, schools, and houses of worship have been shuttered or had to follow other onerous restrictions in an effort to stop the spread of COVID19. Those restrictions have loosened as the result of rising vaccination levels, but now the County seeks to again restrict the rights of vaccinated County residents, yet this time based on a minuscule risk of COVID-19 contraction or transmission.

The overall conundrum is that the county, early this year, went out of its way to reach the most vulnerable populations, focusing especially on poor and minority communities. Vaccine doses and vaccination sites were allocated in ways that were specifically intended to reach those groups, with vaccines given free of charge. Those who didn't get the vaccines, despite these exhaustive efforts, are now the ones suffering from those choices.

There needs to be a better solution. As things stand, LA County is trying to reimpose draconian controls like Australia, while its overall statistics will undoubtedly be no better than places like Texas and Florida with no controls. This will likely have to be resolved in the political arena. Recent moves by Sheriff Villanueva may indicate he intends to have a political future as well.

What About Anglicanorum Coetibus?

Yesterday I said that, although Anglicanorum coetibus so far doesn't seem to have been affected by Traditionis Custodes, maybe it should be. Although it was originally intended to appeal to disgruntled high-church Anglicans, very few of these came in (I think this reflected a profound misunderstanding of Anglicanism). Instead, such appeal as it's had has been largely among the same traditionalist faction of cradle Catholics that Pope Francis intends to bring to heel with Traditionis Custodes.

I observed this movement for almost ten years in the old blog. Even before Anglicanorum coetibus, the most successful Anglican Use Pastoral Provision parish, Our Lady of the Atonement, wound up appealing largely to traditionialist Catholics as well, but its separatist posture resulted in financial as well as sexual abuses.

Media commentators over the weekend across the board haven't mentioned the essentially separatist nature of both Latin mass and Divine Worship parish culture. That the intent of Traditiones Custodes is to take the Extraordinary Form out of the parish environment -- allowing its celebration only outside parishes and forbidding new parishes centered on the Latin Roman Canon -- suggests to me that Francis in fact understands where the problem lies.

I think it's significant that, although Latin Mass apologists say it attracts younger and more generous Catholic families, Traditiones Custodes will have absolutely nil effect on our highly successful novus ordo parish, which fully met its fundraising goal for a building program despite being closed or with restricted worship during the pandemic. In fact, it also conducted a separate drive to renovate the adoration chapel, using the lockdown as an opportunity to do it -- this was fully funded as well. I doubt if Latin mass will be mentioned at all in today's masses.

Visitors have suggested to me that so far, it doesn't look like Traditionis Custodes will have any effect on the ordinariates, at least one of which, in Australia, is on life support without its help. A visitor who follows ordinariate Facebook groups says,

The consensus seems to be that Divine Worship is safe for now, having been established pursuant to an apostolic constitution rather than the motu proprio Summorum Pontificum. And of course its similarity to the OF—-its lectionary, choices of Offertory prayers and Canons of the Mass—-are in other contexts subjects of frequent complaint. It is certainly not “the EF in English“ that many would prefer. Christian Campbell, the SSPX attendee, points this out regularly. But those who are saying “Nothing to see here” are failing to look at the larger picture, it seems to me, which is the Pope’s agenda in suppressing Summorum Pontificum. If he is looking to root out hotbeds of “traditionalist” resistance then the ordinariates should be next in line. I’m sure there are ways around Anglicanorum Coetibus.

Nevertheless, the visitor points out,

As we recall, Msgr Steenson closed the door on Extraordinary Form celebrations in North American ordinariate communities. This led to some negative comments in the blogosphere, although as far as I know only Fr Catania, then still at Mt Calvary, Baltimore was offering the EF. Luke Reese of course offered DW, OF, and EF as PV at Holy Rosary, Indianapolis when it hosted the St Joseph of Arimathea ordinariate community, but that seemed to be okay.

Bp Lopes seems to have lifted that prohibition, and the EF is offered at some North Anerican communities on one or two weekdays. Several communities are hosted by churches that are also TLM parishes, suggesting a certain sympathetic mindset. We recall that Msgr Reid had great difficulty finding a host parish in Victoria, BC after the ordinariate group was asked to leave Our Lady of Fatima. They were finally taken in by the local TLM parish despite having to be wedged in an afternoon time slot.

Now Bp Lopes will have to “go on the record” with the Vatican if he wishes the existing EF masses to continue —- with possible repercussions for his future career — they will have to be offered by ordinariate Pastors/PAs, and it looks as if the concept of a “TLM parish” is being rethought, which may mean that communities have to look for new locations. There have already been several instances of new diocesan pastors being appointed and suddenly the ordinariate group’s finding itself no longer welcome.

An intriguing issue is that, as in fact was done at Our Lady of the Atonement, there doesn't seem to be any prohibition on celebrating the Ordinary Form mass in Latin. The issue is focused on the Roman Canon in Latin, not Latin per se, which again suggests to me that Francis is fully aware of the particular form of EF's totemic status among dissident Catholics. But I think Traditionis Custodes prevents ordinariate parishes just as much as diocesan from celebrating the EF mass in the parish.

Again, as far as I'm aware, there's no single manifesto from traditionalists on why they insist on a pre-Conciliar Roman Canon, but it appears to be at the center of their so far inchoate doctrine. In recent days, several of Fr Hunwicke's posts have hovered around this point. Most recently, he says Francis doesn't have the authority to abrogate Summorum Pontificum, while Hunwicke presumably has the authority to rule on this. Well, he has his following.

But if the ordinaries want to stay out of the crosshairs, not just from Francis but from their brother bishops, they should really shut Hunwicke down.

Reaction To Traditionis Custodes

One thing I've come to like about Pope Francis is how easy it is to find photos of him with a wide range of facial expressions. Whatever else someone may say, he doesn't lack affect. I have a sense, in the absence of equivalent photos, that Leo XIII or Pius XI might have been like this, too. Francis is a good Italian.

There was a general anticipation that something like Traditionis Custodes was in the works, and I've already said that I don't have a dog in the fight over the Latin mass. But scanning reactions yesterday, I was struck by their intellectual weakness -- even beyond that, their un-Catholic nature. The most bizarre was from Fr Hunwicke, who cited an Anglican authority against the pope:

From a private letter to me from Prebendary Michael Moreton (7 November 2001);

"I regard the Roman canon as part of the complex of traditions which characterised the life of the Church as it emerged from the centuries of persecution: a shared rule of faith in the creeds, a shared rule of what constituted Scripture, a shared rule of holy order, and a shared rule of prayer. I do not believe that any part of the Church in later centuries has any authority to alter these canons."

Prebendary Moreton (1917-2014) was an Anglican, never a Roman Catholic. To cite him in an argument from authority is delusional. This is yet another illustration of Hunwicke's apparent view that he didn't need to convert to Catholicism; as an Anglican, he was plenty Catholic enough, and the rest of us should be, too. And I've got to say that, although Anglicanorum coetibus so far doesn't seem to have been affected by Traditionis Custodes, maybe it should be. I don't think it's a stretch to ask if Fr Hunwicke is actually Catholic. Again, if Msgr Newton wants to keep the ordinariates out of the crosshairs, he needs to shut Hunwicke down.

Here's another strange take, in the Register:

Raised with the ordinary form of the Mass, [Sarah] Copeland [a mother of seven from Phoenix,] went to her first Mass in the extraordinary form as a college student and said, “I was blown away by the beauty of the prayers. I just felt like this was the Mass that really exemplified and gave glory to God in the most beautiful sense.”

. . . By contrast, she said she experiences the ordinary form as more rigid because she feels forced to pray at specified times, leaving her less free to contemplate the mystery of the death of Christ.

I interpret this, as far as anyone can, to say she doesn't understand the Latin, so she just hears some droning, which with the candles and altar and stuff lets her mind wander, and she contemplates mysteries at whim. If the mass were in English, she'd be forced to pay attention. This is, unfortunately, the intent of the Vatican II constitutions, that the laity should actively participate in the liturgy. If she wantts to contemplate mysteries, she should find out if the parish has an adoration chapel. Although unintentional, it's hard to imagine a better argument for Traditionis Custodes.

Fr Z is over the top, which is hardly unexpected:

That leads me to my first reaction to the Motu Proprio, Traditionis custodes, which effectively insults the entire pontificate of Benedict XVI and the pastoral provisions of John Paul II and all the people they have affected.

Speaking of nukes, while this is quite awful, it is also good in that the line has been drawn. For all the cant about “unity” – which apparently is something to be forced not fostered – the divisions are now clearer.

I think it's fortuitous that, at Bp Barron's recommendation, I recently read Lumen Gentium. Fr Z makes remarks that I think are questionable in its light:

Holy Mass, particularly according to the pre-Conciliar form, has been called “the most beautiful thing this side of Heaven”. That cannot be contradicted.

However, let us remember that we are on this side of Heaven, and not the other.

Confer Lumen Gentium:

8. Christ, the one Mediator, established and continually sustains here on earth His holy Church, the community of faith, hope and charity, as an entity with visible delineation through which He communicated truth and grace to all. But, the society structured with hierarchical organs and the Mystical Body of Christ, are not to be considered as two realities, nor are the visible assembly and the spiritual community, nor the earthly Church and the Church enriched with heavenly things; rather they form one complex reality which coalesces from a divine and a human element.

In the Church, we are not "this side" of heaven, it's more complex than that. I think it's significant that in his letter accompanying Traditionis Custodes, Francis refers repeatedly to Lumen Gentium, and again, as someone who's read it within the past few weeks, I think he's reading it correctly. One big problem with pre-Conciliarism, which is the school Francis is correcting here, is that it rejects documents like Lumen Gentium.

This means there's really no basis for dialogue, and given reactions like the ones I've linked here, I don't think Francis had much choice than to act as he did.

How Come The Left Never Updated Its Cuba Narrative?

I posted yesterday about how C Wright Mills was deeply involved in creating from the start a Castro "third way" narrative that belatedly tried to create a new revolutionary model that, while totalitarian by nature, wasn't directly tied to Stalinism. This lasted, if it was ever very effective, only until the fall of 1962, when Kennedy, always a hawk in any case, tied Castro directly to Moscow in the Cuban missile crisis. (Although the resolution of the crisis itself has subsequently been portrayed as only a partial win, if that, for Kennedy, it's generally acknowledged that the outcome resulted in Khrushchev's deposition in 1964, so winners and losers are hard to pick.)

The outcome of the missile crisis in popular culture is best illustrated in Hitchcock's 1969 film Topaz. I rewatch both Vertigo and Topaz almost compulsively, in part because I now think, although it's a close case, that Topaz is Hitchcock's greatest. (Both have a peculiar device of a double story arc: in Vertigo, the story seems to be over with the death of "Madeleine", while in Topaz, it seems to be over with the death of Juanita de Cordoba at the hands of the Castro surrogate Rico Parra. In both cases, those deaths only signal the start of a new plot.)

Hitchcock uses what by 1969 was the popular narrative, if not that of the elites, where Castro was always a sinister figure, by 1962 clearly backed by hard-line Stalinists, which Hitchcock underscores using the title sequence of a May Day parade at the Kremlin full of missiles passing in review. In one scene, Michael Nordstrom, the quietly competent CIA agent behind the whole action, is shown in his office with a portrait of Kennedy on the wall behind him.

Hitchcock, never a dummy, relies here on fully established stereotypes, accurate or not, to add depth and credibility to his narrative. Much of the imagery in Vertigo is precious and provincial -- you had to know San Francisco to understand it -- while the imagery in Topaz is visceral throughout.

In the matter of popular imagination, I've also seen the opinion that the stock Hollywood Latin lover, Ramon Novarro, Ricardo Montalban, Desi Arnaz, Anthony Quinn, Pedro Armandariz, faded from popularity with the rise of Castro. The photo at left is Desi Arnaz in 1950. It may as well have come from an ancient Egyptian tomb.

Is it a surprise that, according to Wikipedia, "The film was not particularly well-received or successful at the box-office"? The problem for establishment journalists who by and large write what they're told is that in the elite imagination, the Cuban missile crisis never happened.

There's also the basic incongruity of the left's narrative: it's never been fully able to distance itself from the martyred-Kennedy meme that flooded the media after 1963, with Johnson assuming the Kennedy mantle, not only for civil rights and the war on poverty, but for Viet Nam as well. If Kennedy was right in the missile crisis -- now certainly regarded as his iconic role -- how can anyone question his take on Cuba, its complicity with Stalinism, and its direct threat to our way of life? To change this is a revisionism too far, at least outside faculty lounges.

The answer seems to have been, now for 60 years, for the elites, whenever faced with new stories that don't fit the third way-olive green revolution version of Cuba, to cover their ears and go la-la-la. Thus we have the Babylon Bee: "BLM Changes Name To 'Black And Brown Lives Matter Unless They Are Being Oppressed By Communists'". AOC and Bernie Sanders are forced to contort themselves over the latest developments

For socialists and their fellow travelers everywhere, it’s turning out to be a bummer of a summer. It’s almost bad enough to make you feel sorry for Sen. Bernie Sanders.

Almost.

Sanders, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and their anti-American ilk are stuck defending economic authoritarianism abroad while its victims are pleading for the United States to save them.

. . . It must break their tiny hearts to see Cuban protesters waving American flags and Haitian officials asking the White House for American troops to keep order. Don’t those people know America is a racist, colonial power that feasts on the poor?

C Wright Mills: Cuba As An Idea

The last time I thought much about Cuba was during the 2000 Elián González controversy, when I got the impression that there was a faction of committed leftists who in fact believed, as essentially an article of faith, that Cuba was a workers' paradise, and the boy would be far better off if the US government would return him there. It vaguely occurred to me at the time that Columbia sociologist C Wright Mills had enthusiastically embraced the Cuban revolution not long before his death in 1962.

I did a web search and came up with a 2017 article in The Jacobin, C Wright Mills's Cuban Summer, which described Mills's two-week visit to Cuba in August 1960 that formed the basis for his book Listen, Yankee. He spent three days of the visit interviewing Castro, and the photo above is of one such encounter,

I can't remember now when I read Mills's White Collar (1951), but it must have been at an earlier phase of my life, because I was much impressed by Mills's overall sneering tone over US society then. I went to Wikipedia to find a view that Mills was primarily influenced by figures like George Herbert Mead, John Dewey, Charles Sanders Peirce, and William James, while others call him a "closet Marxist" To that I would add yesterday's caveat here that if Mills was a Marxist, his understanding of Marxism-Leninism was shallow enough to overlook the fact that bourgeois sociology professors would be among the first to be rounded up in a true revolution.

By 1959, Stalinists had had a bad run in the West. Even leaving McCarthy aside, Whittaker Chambers's Witness was published in 1952; Burgess and MacLean's defection beame public in 1956, the same year as Khrushchev's Secret Speech on Stalin's cult of personality and the Hungarian uprising. The image of Marxism needed refreshing, and Castro represented an "olive green revolution", presumably not a red one.

Mills, never a detached academic, seems to have seized an opportunity. The Jacobin piece says,

For his part, Mills saw the Cuban revolutionaries as Marxists, but hoped they would embrace the ideology’s liberating and humanistic aspects. . . . the young rebels were “bereft of any rigid political dogmatism, and being of the younger political generation, they have no experience with old-left Stalinism. They are a new left.”

This of course was at best faculty-lounge wishful thinking from the start, but Mills's intent seems to have been to leverage his prestige to legitimize this narrative. The Jacobin piece notes that Mills spent only two weeks in Cuba and did not speak Spanish. It continues,

Mills’s interviewees were also apparently preselected. The Fair Play for Cuba Committee and the Cuban official Raul Roa had arranged his trip; Mills had neither the ability nor the inclination to seek out those who did not share the revolutionary government’s views. Reading through the interview transcripts, anyone who has conducted research in Cuba will have the vaguely familiar impression of being shepherded toward approved spokesmen.

The transcripts also reveal that Mills pulled lines of inquiry from his own theories — for example, the role of intellectuals, broadly defined, as revolutionary agents. At times this could result in somewhat leading questions: “Would you think that . . . a proper way to define the situation would be like the following: That one small branch of intellectuals went into the hills, including Fidel . . . That is, the Revolution was made by young intelligentsia in contact with the poor people?” Mills listened but also occasionally imposed.

. . . Mills’s premature death in 1962 spared him some of the soul-searching that other foreign intellectuals later faced over Cuba. He did not live to see Castro’s endorsement of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, nor the imprisonment of the Cuban poet Heberto Padilla in 1971. These events largely ended the romance many foreign intellectuals had with the Cuban Revolution. Whether Mills would have reacted similarly is hard to say, but by this point the New Left’s youthful phase was decidedly over.

The “socialism with heart” Mills had hoped for proved too fragile for the Cold War.

The effect of the book on its publication was widespread. The piece says,

By the time Mills died less than two years later, he was receiving nearly ten letters a day from readers all over the world, many asking, “How can you help me get to Cuba so I can help Fidel?”

It's hard to avoid the conoclusioin that Mills at best was deliberately creating a "new left", separate from Stalinism, largely from wishful thinking, dressing it up with a measure of his own academic prestige. Britannica says,

New Left currents first arose in Europe in response to the perceived moral discredit of Soviet communism following Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev’s “secret speech” in February 1956, which revealed the extent of political repression under Joseph Stalin’s leadership. French and British groups adopted the label New Left to denote their search for a socialist “third way,” distinct both from official communism or orthodox Marxism and from mainstream social democracy. Opposition to nuclear weapons and opposition to Cold War bipolarity (a system of international relations characterized by the existence of two superpowers) were critical rallying points for the disaffected communists, independent socialists, and young radicals who formed the New Left’s constituency. Anticolonialism and the problems of the Third World were increasingly salient, especially after the Cuban revolution of 1959.

Viewed from the post-Soviet perspective, the idea of a countervailing bipolar global axis was in reality a fantasy in itself, with the idea of New Left, "third way" independent revolution equally unrealistic. But I think it's a feature of the current left's intellectual bankruptcy that, in its continuing support of the Cuban regime, it maintains the same hard line it's had since 1960.

What of the Cubans?

It seems to me that over the past year or so, there have been two types of demonstration, the Black Lives Matter type, and the populist type. I think Black Lives Matter and the related Critical Race Theory are mislabeled as Marxist (I haven't seen the term Marxist-Leninist used at all, but that would be more accurate if it were correctly applied). BLM is an alliance between bourgeois elites and the Lumpenproletariat. Bourgeois are the traditionial Marxist enemy, while the lumpenproles, street rabble and petty criminals, are unreliable as allies of workers. Nothing could be less Marxist in principle.

The Leninist component of Marxism-Leninism, something the bourgeois Edmund Wilson nevertheless recognized in To The Finland Station, added the extreme ruthlessness necessary to accomplish a revolutionary agenda, without which no such activity can move beyond idle theorizing and play-acting. The problem with both BLM and CRT is that neither recognizes the need for ruthlessness, including the need to pick the right allies and the need to liquidate disloyal elements, which unfortunatrely include both the bourgeois elites and the lumpenproles. (Solzhenitsyn saw the lumpenproles as useful primarily to victimize and torment the bourgeois in the gulag.)

Among other things, this reading suggests that the current bourgeois elites who run the media and the blue states and cities are neither serious nor ruthless enough to maintain hold on power, but at best, Marxist-Leninists have been able to do this for only several generations in any particular country.

This brings us to the other kind of demonstration, the populist. Their demonstrations arise from more spontaneous grievances and tend to be opportunistic. Over the past year, there have been fairly minor demonstrations against lockdown measures in the US, and it's worth noting that these have primarily involved workers and lower-level bourgeois forced out of their jobs or businesses, whose interests opposed the elites, whose income continued throughout the lockdowns. In the US, this spirit culminated in the January 6 incursion into the US Capitol, which the elites have hysterically claimed was worse than 9/11, or now even the Confederacy.

This is a reflection of legitimate class interests, as opposed to the Black Lives Matter movement, which depends on an alliance between out-of-touch elites and a rabble that's willing to play the game for only as long as it suits them.

But this brings us to Cuba. They remind me to some extent of the 1989 popular demonstrations that brought down communist rule in the Warsaw Pact, something I suspect the current Cuban regime recognizes. It clearly fears the influence of social media:

“As if pandemic outbreaks had not existed all over the world, the Cuban-American mafia, paying very well on social networks to influencers and YouTubers, has created a whole campaign … and has called for demonstrations across the country,” President Díaz-Canel said during a nationally televised appearance on July 12 “in which his entire Cabinet was present,” according to the AP. “Mafia” is a common Communist Party term for the Cuban-American exile community, comprised almost entirely of victims of the violent Party’s 62-year rule.

“We’ve seen how the campaign against Cuba was growing on social media in the past few weeks,” he added. “That’s the way it’s done: Try to create inconformity, dissatisfaction by manipulating emotions and feelings.”

As a result it's been shutting down internet access for short periods, but this hasn't been especially successful. I think the outcome in Cuba will depend on how ruthless the regime is prepared to be, along with how many of its hard-core retainers in the state organs it can rely on to carry out its continuing requirements for ruthlessness.

Past a certain point, even the secret police tire of the effort.