Tag: history

Reclaiming the Working Class

Under the influence of this distorted – and non-working class perspective – Marx is wrong, Lenin is mistaken, Stalin is evil, and China is not a Communist country. So desperate has the political Left become in the contemporary West, that one faction of it actually considers the totalitarian ideological leanings of Kim Jong Un’s North Korea (DPRK) as somehow ‘dialectically’ relevant to the British working classes who have had a thoroughly different trajectory of historical development to that of their Korean comrades.

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Superficial Zizek

The racist aspect lies with the fact that Zizek either knows about – but chooses to ignore – indigenous Asian culture, or that he is not interested in any interpretive narrative that lies outside of the scope of a Eurocentric thought. In short, Zizek is a postmodern bourgeois thinker, masquerading as a post-Marxist thinker. How did the dialectical forces of history create this Zizek figure?

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Ancient Astronauts – and the Search For History! (26.9.2012)

The loss of a one sided certainty has paved the way to an unbounded creativity that has led a number of thinkers to radically re-conceive history, and suggest – as Erich Van Daniken does – that human development upon the physical and psychological planes has not been the product of a straight forward Darwinian evolutionary process, but is rather the consequence of interference at the genetic level, carried out by technologically advanced alien civilisations who visited the planet Earth hundreds of thousands of years ago, and who, whilst finding human beings in a very primitive state of development, improved their DNA and bequeathed certain clues for the future development of advanced technology. Van Daniken expressed this ‘ancient astronaut’ theory in his 1968 book entitled ‘Chariots of the Gods – Was God an Astronaut?’ This book has sold millions and has been in print ever since with many reprints occurring in the early 21st century.

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The Mahayana Transformation

‘Collectively, the schools of early Buddhism are often historically referred to as ‘Hinayana’ so as to distinguish them from the emergence of the Mahayana. Whereas the Mahayana becomes historically recognisable around the 1st century CE in India, the Hinayana schools are seen to decline around four centuries later – in the 5th century CE. This demonstrates that both types of Buddhism coexisted for hundreds of years (inIndia) and there are records of monasteries containing monks who adhered to either tradition – living and practicing side by side. The emergence of the Mahayana created the conditions for earlier Buddhism to be viewed as ‘narrow’ and in some way ‘incomplete’. As the Mahayana interpretation represents a substantial expansion and elaboration of the teachings contained within earlier Buddhism, this sets the agenda for the historical interpretation of history with regard to what may be described as the ‘perceived’ developmental history of Buddhism as a distinct academic entity.’

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