There have been a number of talks at Harvard responding to MIM work. I regret not attending all of them. On October 5, Neal A. Baer gave a talk at the Harvard Education School titled “Telling Tales: How Stories Can Make a Difference.” In questions and answers he admitted he gave up sociology when he found a course at Harvard for visual arts.
The talk was obviously in response to a MIM Congress stance against story-telling. Just to recount, among other things, story-tellers have said that I am a “reforming gay” and got a clique of white youth to buy it; a British author wrote a whole book with the premise that I am in control of “weapons of mass destruction” and so on. I am the depository for all loopy white fears, something like what used to be Huey Newton’s job.
Neal Baer is part of the Liberal push-back by the Democratic Party that invested heavily in my lynching over a 20 year period of time, as required in a third party infiltration gambit. I highly suspect he knows of one Hollywood connected spy paid to live with me for a period of years to collect dirt and justify the use of a lynching the Democrats knew they were going to use coming down the road in elections. We purged her.
Baer concluded his talk by saying everyone should be story-tellers. It did not occur to him that if all 300 million Amerikans became story-tellers that would just be more hot air by the rich, more verbal domination of the world’s poor.
Baer came out in the open for egotism by saying that stories are good because they show “that you matter.” In contrast, MIM looks at things at the aggregate level and we told the world before the Obama election what it would mean for global counterrevolution and we were correct that
Amerikan egotism sets back the anti-Amerikan struggle.
To his credit, Baer raised the question of his television audience at NBC. (He is an executive producer for “Law & Order.”) He admitted that not everyone likes controversy or struggle on television, and said they do not have to watch.
Also to his credit, Baer criticized “ER” for not having realistic hospital settings. The television show depicts interns doing things they would not be allowed to do in a real hospital, says Baer. In other words, he believes his art work should respond somehow to reality.
On that central point, MIM does agree with Baer, but we hold that the vanguard party has to be composed of the scientific intelligentsia exclusively. Story-tellers and artists who are such above all else inherently lead parties in a Liberal bourgeois direction in the rich countries.
Regarding his video presentation, I think my own life proves that story-tellers are only capable of post-hoc adjustment such as “oh, that’s why that particular lynching is wrong.” They will never study reality to the extent where they can connect why a general process for all people is necessary to prevent lynching. It takes a vanguard party to “kick it up” to that level.
Of course that does not mean there should be no art. Yet the discussion of art and values should not take a counter-Enlightenment out and that is exactly what is happening with all the CIA/MI6 directed discussion of MIM at Harvard. In the name of opposing “scientism” and going from overall reality to action, the Isaiah Berlin Liberals opposed MIM “totalitarianism.”
Instead, what Walzer tells us Liberals should do is adjust their stories post-hoc. Hence if one notices that an underdog is always the underdog, one should tell stories to raise the underdog and prevent revolution, according to Walzer. So in my case, people are supposed to notice, “uh how come that guy never got a job in a career track despite changes, efforts and x, y and z?” There is really not much between Walzer’s telling a different story to offset previously suspect stories and going to the counter-Enlightenment where we have all stories and no truth — post-modernism.
This discussion is also very akin to how the Berlin discussants linked us to saying there “is only one road.” That has always been a false presentation of even Stalin who said the working class would “row the boat to shore” even without a vanguard party, just that it would take much longer. When flying from New York to London, there is a shortest path, whether Liberals and post-modernists like it or not. That does not mean stopping over at Malta before London is not also pretty darned efficient, compared with going to Los Angeles first.
The central problem is that with a country of 250 million exploiters and oppressors like the United $tates, (leaving room for say 50 million oppressed people) producing televisions series where everyone does self-criticism in connection to social reality instead of what floats their boats individually would never sell. So story-telling is at once connected up with profit-making, career and family. The rewards for the most exploitive and oppressive stories are highest in the United $tates and similar rich countries.
MIM is not even slightly concerned about Neal Baer & Co. It’s all the better to see various white nationalists go into action so others won’t be fooled again in the future.
The Maoist Internationalist Movement 