Finally, a black guy tells the truth about how democrats have lied to, and used, black people for decades to get their votes. This is really good.
It’s a little over 18 minutes but well worth watching! It’s just too bad this couldn’t be required viewing in every school in America, especially schools that have a majority of black students, so they can learn the truth about the democrat party.
Look closely at this masterpiece by the Ukrainian artist Ilya Repin.
This is what life was like for too many people in a pre-industrial society.
Read the Wikipedia article. Some of the people pulling the barge had once been part of what passed for the middle class in that place and time. Once they lost their footing in the middle class, this was their fate. As far as I know, none were convicts – they were just people down on their luck and desperate to make some sort of a living. Their only option was to hire themselves out for toil too arduous even for a beast of burden.
Barge Haulers is inspired by scenes witnessed by the artist while holidaying on the Volga in 1870. He made a number of preparatory studies, mostly in oil, while staying in Shiriaev Buerak, near Stavropol. The sketches include landscapes, and views of the Volga and barge haulers.
The characters depicted are based on actual people whom the artist came to know while preparing the work. He had had difficulty finding subjects to pose for him, even for a fee, because of a folklorish belief that a subject’s soul would leave his possession once his image was put down on paper. The subjects include a former soldier, a former priest, and a painter. Although Repin depicted eleven men, women also performed the work and there were normally many more people in a barge-hauling gang; Repin selected these figures as representative of a broad swathe of the working classes of Russian society. That some had once held relatively high social positions dismayed the young artist, who had initially planned to produce a far more superficial work contrasting exuberant day-trippers (which he himself had been) with the careworn burlaks. Repin found a particular empathy with Kanin, the defrocked priest, who is portrayed as the lead hauler and looks outwards towards the viewer.
[…]
Barge Haulers on the Volga shows a row of eleven male burlaks dragging a barge on the Volga River that must be pulled upstream against the current. The men are dressed in rags and bound with leather harnesses. They are rendered as mostly stoical, although in obvious physical discomfort, with their bodies bowed in toil. The scene is rendered in a white, silvery light which has been described as “almost Venetian”. In earlier studies, it was dominated by blue tones.The men appear to be unsupervised and form the focus of the picture, with the barge relegated to a minor role at the rear of the frame. Further in the distance is a tiny steam-powered boat, perhaps a suggestion that the back-breaking labour of the barge haulers is no longer necessary in the industrial age. Also worthy of note is the inverted Russian flag flying from the main mast of the barge suggesting adding to the sense that something is not quite right. Repin echoes the stop-go rhythm of the labour in the undulating line of the workers’ heads. In the preparatory studies, many of the figures were positioned differently; for example the second man was shown wearing a cap with his head bowed into his chest.
There is a general sense of mounting exhaustion and despair moving from left to right amongst the group; the last hauler seems oblivious to his surroundings and drifts from the line out towards the viewer. The exception is a fair-haired boy in the centre of the group. Set brightly against the uniform muted tones of his companions, his head is raised looking into the distance, while he pulls against his straps as if determined to free himself from his task…
Russian and Ukrainian society at that time had too little infrastructure to support much of a middle class. It was not simply a matter of income inequality…there was too little wealth to go around, because too little wealth was being produced. Industrialization was still in its infancy. Fossil fuels were in very limited use.
Sound familiar?
This is what the leftist/green/pro-jihadi convergence wants – not for themselves, of course – but for us.
Be thankful that it is not OUR faces staring out of that bleak canvas.
Not yet, anyway.
Leonid Kharitonov & Red Army Choir – Song of the Volga Boatmen (Live)
(h/t: The Osprey)
Feodor Chaliapin – Song of Volga Boatmen (1936)
(h/t: Bumr50)
On the President’s favorite philosopher, Saul Alinsky.
It is a matter of no small amusement for the journalist and agitator Nicholas von Hoffman that his beloved mentor, Saul Alinsky, learned the craft of “organizing” at the feet of Chicago’s most notorious mobsters. This was nearly eighty years before the self-proclaimed radical became a household name, having posthumously inspired an up-and-coming organizer who went on to become the forty-fourth president of the United States. Alinsky’s entrée to the Al Capone gang (which, tellingly, he called a “public utility”) was neither his ruthlessness nor his penchant for rabble-rousing, though a surfeit of both qualities surely impressed his friend Frank (“the Enforcer”) Nitti. It was, instead, his academic credentials.
A freshly minted doctor of criminology from the University of Chicago, Alinsky sought out, bonded with, and closely studied anti-social types. His experience proved invaluable in his lifelong pursuit of “social justice,” the organizer’s panacea. Alinsky even found a Depression-era job at Joliet’s hard-knocks penitentiary, assessing the suitability of inmates for parole. Not every crook had the panache of the Enforcer, and the work soon bored Alinsky, whose promiscuous mind was easily given to boredom. Yet there was an oasis in this desert: the evaluation of an occasional con man. In an unintentionally hilarious vignette, von Hoffman relates that “one of the flim-flam men initiated Alinsky into the secrets of his trade.” We’re never told to which “his” the trade-secrets in question belonged—the flim-flammer or the organizer. It turns out not to matter. They’re both frauds.
Fraud is, in fact, the leitmotif of Radical, von Hoffman’s adoring portrait of Alinsky.[1] This oughtn’t be taken the wrong way: Radical is an enjoyable, sometimes even an endearing, read. Von Hoffman is an engaging writer, especially during the stretches when he manages to rein in his seething disdain for “teabaggers,” “the rich,” and other Americans who actually like America. There was a self-conscious coldness about Alinsky, who urged disciples to nurture what von Hoffman describes as the “cold anger that fosters calculated and measured action.” This “Alinsky aesthetic” held social workers and other idealistic progressives in nearly as low esteem as smug capitalists. It lauded the good sense of Saint Paul (a model organizer in the agnostic Alinsky’s eyes), for leaving “the poor to Jesus while he went after people with at least a little substance.” It’s a stripe of bloodless cynicism that will ring a bell for those who’ve closely watched the first two years of Barack Obama’s presidency. Yet von Hoffman’s admiration for his subject illuminates the fire that burned within this “picador in the political corrida,” whose “irreverence was his banderilla.”
No, fraud is not a reason to take a pass on Radical but a cause to read it and be astonished. Even here, in this most affectionate of depictions, there can be no camouflaging that an “organizer” is a fraud through and through—in his tactics, in his motives, and in his carefully crafted self-image.
Take the organizer’s underlying premise: he presents himself as a builder of “small-d democracy.” “Democracy” is a codeword. To the unwary, it is drained of meaning, vaguely connoting a benign call to freedom and self-government. But for the revolutionary—and that’s what Alinsky’s radical is about, revolution—a democrat is the heroic Jacobin pitted in a fight to the finish against the evil, moneyed, ruling aristocrat. Life in America is a Manichean war in which the democrat inhabits the side of the angels.
Angels matter, by the way. Alinsky began Rules for Radicals—which was originally to be called Rules for the Revolution—with an “over the shoulder acknowledgment” of Lucifer as the “very first radical . . . who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively that he at least won his own kingdom.” Inconvenient, and thus glossed over by Alinsky and von Hoffman, is the minor detail that the kingdom “won” by the fallen angel was . . . hell—a trenchant observation from the former radical turned patriot, David Horowitz, who acidly adds, “Typical of radicals not to notice the ruin they have left behind.” [emphasis mine]
[…]
Once you understand the organizer’s game, everything else falls into place. He is in a duel to the death with unprecedented prosperity: a system in which the entrenched interests are formidable, in which the vast middle is more interested in being an entrenched interest than a revolutionary, and in which the riff-raff—with unemployment “insurance” now stretching 99 weeks and “poverty” measured by how few flat-screen TVs one can afford—have yet to realize how bad they have it. With the odds stacked against him, the organizer needs one thing and one thing alone: power. For organizing is not about improving the lives of the destitute. Saving them, von Hoffman observes, is a drain on the organizer’s sparse resources and energy. And for all the high-minded twaddle about democracy, it, too, turns out to be readily dispensable. “Democracy,” wrote Alinsky, “is not an end; it is the best political means available toward the achievement of [the organizer’s] values.” The organizer’s highest value is empowering the organizer.
Following in the footsteps of Faust, Saul Alinsky learned from the Underworld in more than one sense of that word. Alinsky, in turn, became a primary mentor and role model to Barack Hussein Obama.
I acknowledge that it is rather unusual for evildoers to boast so openly about this particular source of “inspiration.” Maybe they expect to garner a certain cachet in radical chic circles. Be that as it may, no matter how entertaining that book supposedly is, I do not plan to read Radical. Neither von Hofmann nor any other evil pseudointellectual of the radical left deserves a single penny of my hard-earned wages.
The Diary of Daedalus
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