NelsonRushton
Doctorate in mathematics from the University of Georgia, specializing in probability theory. Masters in AI from the University of Georgia. 15 years as a computer science professor at Texas Tech. Now I work as a logician for an AI startup. Married with one son. He's an awesome little dude.
I identify as an Evangelical Christian, but many Evangelicals would say that I am a deist mystic, and that I am going to Hell. Spiritually, the difference between me and Jordan Peterson is that I believe in miracles. The difference between me and Thomas Paine (an actual deist mystic) is that I believe the Bible is a message to us from the Holy Spirit -- and the difference between me and Billy Graham is that I think there is noise in the signal.
User ID: 2940
chapters 13 and 14, not 3 and 4.
OK I see, you are quoting Chapter 13 not Chapter 3. Looks like the Babylonians are in for some Old Testament justice.
This is something I will address at greater length in my next post (note that it was me who first brought up Moses in connection with Genocide), but long story short is this: if we compare Mein Kampf and Isaiah, one is self-righteous, entitled, and enraged, and the other his humble, repentant, and resolved. Jamming on the enemy in itself has nothing to do with identity politics.
There is also an important question of fact here. The moral axiom that connects Judeo-Christian foreign policy , so to speak, from the bronze age to the 20th century is this: like a police officer making an arrest, you are obligated to handle your enemies with the lightest touch you safely can -- but no lighter, and them's the breaks. As a matter of fact, in the bronze age, the lightest touch you can safely use, when bordering a near-peer ruthless belligerent, may be enslavement or genocide (what is your other option? "I guess that war is over; whew; you can all go home now; better luck next time wiping us out and raping our wives and daughters "). But I do not believe Jews per se were threat to Germany at all -- even if Marxism was a threat to Germany (which it was), and Jews were disproportionally Marxist (which they were). The 30,000 Jews who won medals for bravery in WWI were certainly not a threat to Germany -- but many of those very men, and their families, perished in Nazi death camps all the same.
Now how did Hitler think when the shoe was on the other foot, and his own tribe was being a pest and got their asses kicked? If the allied cause was a Jewish conspiracy like Hitler charged, then he should have expected Old Testament justice at Versailles. Austria and Prussia, and their union in the German Empire, had fought bloody wars of aggression against the allies with whom they sought terms at Versailles, and in some cases against their fathers and grandfathers. So by Hitler's own logic, the allies would have been within their rights to push for a final solution to the German Problem while they had the upper hand. But the Versailles treaty, hard as it was on Germany, was not the Holocaust (not the same ballpark, not the same sport) -- and yet what did Hitler say about it? Vae Victus? No. What did we do to deserve this? Not exactly. He said it was an unfair, unjust, absolute abomination. Poor baby.
And that's identity politics: group justice with double standards. It is holding that your people are entitled to prey on others whenever the opportunity presents itself, and whining in self-righteous indignation when the shoe is on the other foot. The Hebrews didn't do that, and neither did the pagans.
NelsonRushton
1mo ago
Sources?
NelsonRushton
1mo ago
I was hoping you were referring to the dystopian movie Brazil, written by written by Terry Gilliam, Charles McKeown, and Tom Stoppard.
What are the references to? They don't seem to be from the book of Isaiah. For example you have
Every Babylonian who didn't manage to "flee to their native land" (3:14) would be slaughtered, including prisoners (3:15), infants (3:16,18)
But Isaiah 3:14-16 reads
The Lord will enter into judgment with the ancients of his people, and the princes thereof: for ye have eaten up the vineyard; the spoil of the poor is in your houses. What mean ye that ye beat my people to pieces, and grind the faces of the poor? saith the Lord God of hosts. Moreover the Lord saith, Because the daughters of Zion are haughty, and walk with stretched forth necks and wanton eyes, walking and mincing as they go, and making a tinkling with their feet: Therefore the Lord will smite with a scab the crown of the head of the daughters of Zion, and the Lord will discover their secret parts. In that day the Lord will take away the bravery of their tinkling ornaments about their feet, and their cauls, and their round tires like the moon,
This is all about God's judgment upon Israel, and in any case doesn't match the themes of fleeing, slaughtering, prisoners, or infants.
Putting part of your post in quotes and googling leads me to this reddit thread: https://old.reddit.com/r/DebateReligion/comments/11a4ttc/isaiahs_prophecy_of_the_destruction_of_babylon_is/
which misquotes Isaiah over and over. Did you check those with the original source (the Bible) before you posted?
NelsonRushton
1mo ago
The holocaust's identity aspects weren't unique to Nazi Germany. Jewish pogroms had already been common in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and weren't seen as especially noteworthy.
Few characteristics outside mathematics and the physical sciences are unique to anything, but the matters of frequency and severity are what set things apart. Can you give some examples of pogroms you think are comparable to the Holocaust in scope and severity?
- It's true that ancient people didn't have the same justifications, but they lacked knowledge of genetics.
I don't think identity politics rests on a quantitative understanding of genetics. Everyone knows what tribes, races, and religions are.
The concept of Nazi Germany as uniquely evil wasn't even really a thing during and shortly after ww2
Can you support this, or any of the claims in the last two paragraphs?
NelsonRushton
1mo ago
Sorry, I don't accept "agree to disagree"
lol. What does you not accepting it look like? Whatever it is, knock yourself out.
I think we've reached a terminal point in this thread of the discussion, where we are at what Sowell calls a "conflict of visions". I have read Isaiah in its entirety, and I presume you have as well. There is no more data to collect, but we see the data through the lens of different concepts and different values. The truth is, you aren't going to convince me of your reading of Isaiah through dialectic, and I'm not going to convince you of mine, even if we are both being honest and logical. The denial of that truth is a chief delusion of the so-called "Enlightenment". A sower went out to sow his seed; and as he sowed, some fell by the way side...". That's life.
With respect to "humble laments", sure there are plenty of Roman myths where the god, and by extension the people the god represents, are humbled in some sort of way.
I wish you would have given an example of a source. I'm skeptical of this (that any Roman myth has the tone and general purpose of Isaiah) to begin with, but if it comes without a source on the first stab, I'm doubly skeptical.
NelsonRushton
1mo ago
Coincidentally, I have also been thinking about communism a lot lately, namely, its impossibility, and how it is treated in public discourse. I guess I'll just add on to your thinking on it. [emphasis added]
Just two cents more on this. The most serpentine Marxists define socialism as the workers owning the means of production, without reference to state force. Alright then, what's stoppin' ya'? Surely someone could get a small business loan from Geroge Soros or somebody to start a small business -- say, a Taco Bell franchise -- that was collectively owned by the workers, and you're off to the races with your socialist experiment. Why no clamor for this from the Socialists? Not a peep?
The reason is that we know, and they know, that the truly employee-owned-and-managed Taco Bell would be almost certain to go out of business, beaten in the market by competitors owned by investors who hold the personnel accountable from the top down. It turns out that managing the means of production is a skill, that it is crucial to the success of any business, and that most cashiers and taco-makers don't have it. So... the only way that business can exist is with heavy handed, forcible intervention in the market -- say, to force all of its competitors into the same model. And then all of their suppliers (because the employee-run business can't afford market prices for stock and equipment), and all of their customers (because otherwise they buy from the lowest bidder to cut costs, which would be a top-down managed company), transitively, until you get guess what? A po-lice state.
NelsonRushton
1mo ago
modern Ashkenazi Jews are descended from intermarried Jews and Romans.
Many modern people are descended from the interbreeding of masters and slaves. What I mean is, if only they had incorporated conquered people into their society having the rights of citizens.
NelsonRushton
1mo ago
Hitler's stated goal was to make the world better for ethnic Germans at no expenses spared for other ethnicities (and with particular vengeance towards some specific ones that he considered their sworn enemies).
Can you point me (or us) to Hitler's statements on this?
NelsonRushton
1mo ago
people ultimately believe that aiming to advance one race at the expense of others is intrinsically evil because they are instilled with this message from early on
I don't think this accurately describes our shared common moral sense. If people in a black church take up a collection to send money to hungry children in Zimbabwe, that they could have sent to even hungrier children in Ukraine, then they are advancing their race at the expense of others and few people have a problem with it, and I wouldn't have a problem with it. On a similar note using religion instead of race, if two people were taking up collections, one to aid persecuted Christians in Pakistan and one to aid persecuted Muslims in China, I would preferentially donate to save-the-Christians, and I think that is OK too, and I think it also accords with common sense (and that the push for "effective altruism" defies common sense).
What is wrong in our moral common sense is not advancing your people at the expense of others; it is advancing your people by violating the negative rights of others. Which is what Hitler (and Lenin and Mao) did, of course.
NelsonRushton
1mo ago
Then isn't the simpler explanation the years of propaganda they go through in public schools, or all the media portraying him as the ultimate evil, while the ins and outs of communism are mostly glossed over?
I'm surprised this has not been the go-to explanation in the discussion. The clue is not that Hitler is stigmatized, but the pattern of the what Moldbug calls the "cathedral" minimizing and excusing communist atrocities even after they became known. I think this pattern is obvious.
At least with hitler, as long as you weren’t… a jew, a slav, a jehovah’s witness, a political opponent, a homosexual, a cripple… you were sort of safe cravenly heil hitlering your way though the war-torn hellscape
I agree with you that Nazi persecution was more predictable and narrowly targeted than that of the communists, but you left one important group off your list of those who were marked for death by the Nazis: people who would not keep their mouth shut and their tail between their legs. The fact that there were so few of these is a testament to how ironically wrong Hitler was about the alleged greatness of the German Volk. Hitler pointedly lambasts sycophants in Mein Kampf, but he hypocritically demanded it of his vassals and subjects, on pain of death. Hitler reigned over a nation of Spucklecker (spit lickers; his term for sycophants) -- and if they hadn't been, he couldn't have.
I don't think spit-licker is too unkind a term for someone who professes Christianity, and yet silently, passively watches the Nazi persecution of the Jews. I have never done anything so brave as stand up to a murderous tyrannical regime, and so I cannot claim that I would have done anything different than what most Germans did, even most of the ones who recognized Hitler as a ruinous, berserk tyrant. Maybe I would and maybe I wouldn't. What I am saying is that those of us who are (or might be) spit-lickers should recognize those among us those who demonstrably aren't, such as Deitrich Bonhoeffer and Martin Niemöller, as better men than us in the most important way. In the words of Solzhenitsyn,
And as for him who lacks the courage to defend even his own soul, let him not brag of his progressive views, boast of his status as an academician or a recognized artist, a distinguished citizen or general. Let him say to himself plainly: I am cattle, I am a coward, I seek only warmth and to eat my fill.
NelsonRushton
1mo ago
given that the deaths caused by Lenin and Mao are not exactly a secret.
Not exactly a secret, but not nearly as embedded in our cultural consciousness as those caused by Hitler. You should try asking 30 young adults who the most prolific mass murderers of the 20th century were. I did that experiment several times in the 90's. Stalin was rarely mentioned, and Mao was never mentioned once. Hitler was always the first name on the collective lips of the class. The situation is probably a little different now, but I would be very surprised if perception has caught up to reality.
NelsonRushton
1mo ago
It is universally acknowledged that the Roman pantheon was fluid and integrated the idols of foreigners that came under the hegemony of the Roman people.
If only they integrated the people who worshiped those idols.
Nice thesis statement.
What I would be interested to see is evidence in the sacred texts of other religions, or in the histories of other tribes, of humble laments of the sort found in Isaiah, Ezekiel, and Jeremiah -- in contrast with the "them's the breaks" tone of the pagan texts, or the "we got stabbed in the back by vermin within and without" tone of Mein Kampf. Of course I haven't read every mythological treatise of every world religion, so maybe you can teach me something.
That's what identity politics is. It's the belief that politics is about using the state to strengthen and benefit one's people.
I actually don't agree with this, and it is a central subject of my next planned post. The belief that politics is about "using the state to strengthen and benefit one's people" is what I would call the pagan view, but in my next post I will argue that Hitler was not a pagan. He doesn't want Germany to expand and flourish because they are his people, and he would not gracefully tolerate the same view from other tribes. Hitler wants Germany to expand, flourish, and conquer because they are the best people, in an absolute sense -- and that their flourishing and conquering at the expense of others is the only course in harmony with the one and only Natural Order.
NelsonRushton
1mo ago
Thanks. fixed.
I explicitly did not count famine deaths as murders, but counted them separately on top of murders. Note (with emphasis added):
caused the deaths of tens of millions more through ideology-driven malfeasance.
The number of Chinese civilians that were murdered and needlessly starved
Hitler's Identity Politics, Part I
(c) Feb 10, 2025, By J. Nelson Rushton
Note:
This post is an installment of a book I am writing, under the working title They See not, which I am serializing as a series of posts on The Motte. The book is planned to be about the nature and common characteristics of populist tyrannical movements, with special focus on the woke ideology, and about how to combat such movements. The first three posts in the series were:
- Introduction: Past peak Woke? Don't count on it.
- Say then, my friend... Plato on Democracy and Tyranny
- Victim Identity Politics and Wokenesss
The current chapter is entitled Hitler's Identity Politics ,Part I.
Introduction: Cargo-Cult Political Science
No one else is considered the face of modern evil like Hitler. That is peculiar, because Mao Zedong murdered far more people than Hitler did, and caused the deaths of tens of millions more through ideology-driven malfeasance. The number of Chinese civilians that were murdered and needlessly starved under Mao was probably greater than the total number of deaths in World War II and the Holocaust from all causes, on all sides, civilian and military combined [source]. Moreover, Bolshevik revolutionary leader Vladimir Lenin, the man who was Mao's practical model of success, murdered just as many as Hitler, and, unlike Hitler, founded a regime that transformed his country into Mordor for generations.
Yet a statue of Lenin, sans head, stood in the Mandalay Bay Hotel in Las Vegas for years. One stands in Seattle at the corner of 35th St. and Fremont as of this writing, and that one has the head on. It is not unusual to hear people quote the allegedly wise sayings of Mao and Lenin on their merits, even while being aware of their crimes. People say things like, As Mao Zedong said, women hold up half the sky. Joe Biden repeated this quote in 2021 in a commencement address at the US Coast Guard Academy, though he did not mention Mao. It also once happened that Trump unknowingly quoted Adolf Hitler, and you can compare the news coverage of those two events by looking at the results of this google search in terms of news coverage compared to this one.
While I believe that Mao was a man consumed by evil, I also believe that when Mao said women hold up half the sky, he identified an important truth and put it in a memorable and persuasive way. Is it OK to quote Mao on that, on the merits of the saying, in spite of the fact that he killed tens of millions of people? Some think it is and some think it isn't, and I honestly I don't know. But I do know that nobody (outside of a skinhead rally) begins a paragraph with "As Adolf Hitler said, ...". That is even though Hitler was a more cogent writer and speaker than Mao -- and, like Mao, or Lenin, or any other tyrant, some of what Hitler said had merit. Even a blind, evil pig finds an acorn once in a while. I also know that there aren't any statues of Hitler in Las Vegas or Seattle, with or without the head -- and no one would put one up because it would make them a social and economic pariah. So why is Hitler completely demonized, in a way that Lenin and Mao are not?
I submit there is a great deal of cargo-cult science surrounding Hitler. The phrase cargo cult science comes from Richard Feynman's 1974 Caltech commencement address, where he related the following story:
In the South Seas there is a "cargo cult" of people. During the war, they saw airplanes land with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they've arranged to imitate things like runways, to put fires [like landing lights] along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut [like a control tower] for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head like headphones, and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas. He's the controller, and they wait for the airplanes to land.
The moral of Feynman's story is that when you look at something to see what makes it tick, the features that matter are not always the ones that meet the eye most easily.
For example, in the broadest strokes, Hitler was a far-right national socialist. Many people hold that since Hitler was "far right", the more right-wing you are, the more like Hitler you must be. And many hold that, since Hitler was a nationalist, the more nationalist you are, the more like Hitler you must be. But, for some reason, vanishingly few people hold that the more socialist you are, the more like Hitler you must be -- even though, if one actually reads the Nazi platform, it has about as much for Bernie Sanders to love as it has for John Birch. But at the end of the day, saying that Hitler was essentially defined by his right-wingism, or his nationalism, or his socialism, just because he was a right wing national socialist, is no more logical per se than saying that what defined him was his distinctive style of moustache. Accepting any of these uncritically, from the nationalism to the socialism to the funny little moustache, is what Feynman would call cargo cult (political) science.
Beyond the question of what made Hitler and his ideology so evil, there is widespread uncritical acceptance of the proposition that Hitler was evil in the first place -- even radioactively evil, in a way that even Lenin, Stalin, and Mao Zedong are not, though the latter were more prolific mass murders. As a kid growing up in America in the 70's and 80's, I naturally accepted that Hitler was evil. It did not have to be explained to me in any detail what made Hitler count as being evil; duh, he started World War II and murdered six million Jews. Of course anyone who launches a war of conquest is pure evil. Like Hitler. Or James K. Polk. No, wait a minute; that can't be right. But of course anyone and orchestrates a genocide is evil. Like Hitler. Or Moses. No, wait a minute; that's not right either. Weights and weights, measures and measures.
Branding Hitler as evil without being able to cogently say why is dangerous for two reasons. First, it makes it more likely that we might be following in his footsteps without realizing it. Second, it increases the risk that our children will reject our assessment of Hitler when they see that we have made up our minds for no good reason -- and that could make them more vulnerable to jumping on the bandwagon if another Hitler comes along, especially a Hitler in sheep's clothing. For both of those reasons, it is important to understand what made Hitler Hitler in deeper than cargo-cult fashion, so that we can better recognize whatever that thing is in other contexts -- most importantly within our own hearts. Or do you believe that, whatever made Hitler Hitler, it can't happen here, or that you have none of it in you?
I will argue that what makes Hitler literally Hitler, first and foremost, was not his nationalism, or his socialism, or his right-wingism, or his wars of aggression, or even his penchant for genocide, but his identity politics. I define identity politics as the embrace of a caste system with different moral standards for different groups, based on demographic characteristics such as race, religion, and ethnicity. Hitler practiced identity politics of two substantively different forms: one form to rationalize his wars of aggression (primarily against Slavs), and another to rationalize his attempted genocide of the Jews. These will be discussed in the following sections.
Pagan Views of the International Order
Not everyone who launches wars of aggression, even copious wars of aggression, is trading in identity politics. Consider, for example, the opening lines of the Anglo Saxon epic Beowulf:
Lo! The Spear-Danes in days gone by
And the kings who ruled them had courage and greatness.
We have heard of those princes’ heroic campaigns.
There was Shield Sheafson, scourge of many tribes,
A wrecker of mead-benches, rampaging among foes.
This terror of the hall-troops had come far.
A foundling to start with, he would flourish later on
As his powers waxed and his worth was proved.
In the end each clan on the outlying coasts
Beyond the whale-road had to yield to him
And begin to pay tribute. That was one good king!
Note that in the Saxon mind, Shield Sheafson was "one good king". Why? Because he drove men in terror, not from their trenches, not from their fortresses, but from their bar stools, where they had presumably been minding their own business before he showed up -- and because he did this far and wide, making war on and subjugating, not one, not two, but every neighboring tribe, and exacting tribute from them like a schoolyard bully on an indefinite basis.
Note also what these lines do not say about Shield. They do not say that he settled some ancient score, or imposed cosmic justice on his tribe's historical exploiters, or even that the clans "beyond the whale road" deserved what they got because they were lesser men than the Danes. Sheafson's greatness lay in his sheer will-to-power and the macht to impose it on others. Moreover, the hero of the passage is not a member of the poet's tribe: Shield was a Dane, while the poet is a Saxon. If Shield Sheafson was a historical person, the author's ancestors may have been among his victims -- and yet the poet esteems Sheafson's mægen (greatness) impartially. Even if Shield was not a historical person, this glimpse into the Saxon mind tells us something important about them: if they glorify a Danish king for his rapacious imperialism, they certainly wouldn't need a moral pretext justify their own kings waging wars of aggression -- such as that targets had it coming because they did it to us first, or even because they were lesser men than us. The greater men they were before we whipped them, the better. Lo!
For a second example of the pagan view of warfare, consider Homer's Iliad. The Iliad tells the story of the beginning of the Trojan War. It is a tale of heroism and excellence on both sides -- but also, as much as anything, a lament for men caught in a bloody struggle whose making was beyond their control. If you had to pin the blame for the catastrophe on a single person it would be the Trojan prince Paris -- but he is more of a self-indulgent simpleton than a villain; his bumbling takes place before the story begins, and is barely deemed worth mentioning by Homer. In Homer, there are no black hats and no white hats, for individuals or for groups. Though the story was written by a Greek poet, and was a national epic of ancient Greece (comparable to a book of their Bible), it could have been written by a Trojan with much the same perspective, even if with far less craft.
Considering Beowulf and the Iliad side by side, we see that whether the story is written by the winners or the losers, there is no need in the pagan mind to cast international conflicts as matters of right and wrong, or of who is entitled to what (in stark contrast, for example, to the conflict between Israel and the Palestinian people in modern times). We should be careful not project part of our own worldview onto Homer or the Beowulf poet, and ascribe to them the belief that "might makes right". In fact, they would find that view alien. Their view of international relations is not that might makes right, but that might makes might, and right barely enters into the picture. Lo!
For a third example we will consider the Roman Republic. In 61 BC, in honor of his 45th birthday, a monument was erected to the Roman general Pompey bearing this inscription:
Pompey, the people’s general, has in three years captured fifteen hundred cities, and slain, taken, or reduced to submission twelve million human beings.
There is no indication, in the inscription or anywhere else, that Pompey was seeking vengeance or justice, or that the Goths and Gauls he subjugated, enslaved, and killed were scumbags, or even bad folks.
The Romans did think of barbarians as lesser men than themselves, but they did not feel entitled by a sense of cosmic justice to rule over them on that account. On the contrary, the Romans believed that Heaven as well as Earth existed in a Hobbesian state of nature: an amoral war of all against all, or what we might call the "law of the jungle". While the Romans believed that their own gods favored Roman victory and imperialism, they also believed that foreign gods, just as real as their own, favored their barbarian adversaries in much the same way. Thus before battle, the Romans prayed not only to their own gods, but sometimes to those of their enemies as well. The Roman prayer to the gods of their enemies was known as the evocatio, and a version of this prayer, said during the siege of Carthage, is recorded by the Roman historian Macrobius Theodosius:
I call upon the one in whose protection are the people and community of Carthage,
whether it be a god or a goddess, and upon you above all,
who have undertaken to protect this city and people,
and ask you all for your favour:
may you all desert the people and community of Carthage,
leave their sacred places, temples, and city, and depart from them ...
and come to Rome, to me and my people,
and may our sacred places, temples, city be more acceptable and approved.
The Romans did not share our modern idea of human rights. Human rights, in the modern sense, are rights granted equally to all men by natural law. The Romans had a sophisticated code of due process, but the rights of the accused -- e.g., to stand trial and cross examine witnesses before being deprived of liberty or property -- were in their view not human rights granted to all men by natural law, but Roman rights granted to Romans by the state of Rome! Acts 22 relates the following:
When they tied Paul down to lash him, Paul said to the officer standing there, “Is it legal for you to whip a Roman citizen who hasn’t even been tried?” When the officer heard this, he went to the commander and asked, “What are you doing? This man is a Roman citizen!” So the commander went over and asked Paul, “Tell me, are you a Roman citizen?” “Yes, I certainly am,” Paul replied. “I am, too,” the commander muttered, “and it cost me plenty!” Paul answered, “But I am a citizen by birth!” The soldiers who were about to interrogate Paul quickly withdrew when they heard he was a Roman citizen, and the commander was frightened because he had ordered him bound and whipped. [Acts 22:25-29, NLT]
The passage records that under Roman law, jailing and flogging a Roman citizen without a trial was strictly forbidden, and must have carried a rather grievous penalty -- but jailing and flogging a mere human being without a trial was allowed. Even if this account is not fully historical, it must have been intended to be believable to its contemporaneous audience -- which could only be the case if that was indeed the Roman policy.
In the Roman mind, when Caesar conquered Gaul, he was not violating anyone's "human rights" -- for there were no "human rights" to violate in the first place. Does this mean that the Romans were engaging in identity politics? On the contrary, it means they were not. Identity politics is not merely protecting your own people and exploiting others; it is protecting your own people, and exploiting others, and then wailing and moaning in righteous indignation when the shoe is on the other foot. Identity politics is when Ibram Kendi complains about the Atlantic Slave trade and the exploitation of Native Americans America while turning a blind eye to the vicious enslavement of a million whites by the Barbary Pirates. But hypocritical, self-righteous wailing of this sort was not the Roman way.
Consider, for example, the Roman reaction to the worst defeat in the history of the Republic, in the Battle of Cannae at the hands of Hannibal Barca. Around 60,000 Romans were killed at Cannae in a single day -- far more than the number of Americans killed in the whole of the Korean war. Additionally, between 10,000 and 20,000 Roman soldiers were taken prisoner, and Hannibal sent ten of these to Rome to plead for ransom for the rest. And what was the conversation in Rome over this event? What an affront it was to the Natural Order for Romans to be defeated by barbarians? How Rome had been stabbed in the back by traitors from within and without? How it would never have happened but for the weather? As the Roman historian Livy relates the events, no to all of that. There was resolve to continue fighting, and a somber debate over whether to ransom the hostages. The decision of the senate was to not ransom the hostages, because this would only fill Hannibal's coffers and enable and encourage further aggression. The ten Roman soldiers who had come as a delegation to Rome were sent back to Hannibal under Roman guard -- because they had given their word to return to whatever fate awaited them at the hands of the foreign general. Even the law of the jungle is a law, and fair's fair.
The Hebrew View of the International Order
The ancient Hebrews were not pagans, and their view of tribal conflict was fundamentally different from that of pagans. The Hebrews held (and still hold) that the universe has an immutable and impartial moral compass, that points in the same direction for every man and every group of men -- and that therefore, when two tribes go to war, one must be in the wrong and deserve defeat. But the Hebrews were not fundamentalists; in the scads of wars that show up in their own historical account, half of the time it was the Hebrews that were in the wrong. More than half the time, actually, by my recollection.
As an illustration of the Hebrew view, consider the book of Isaiah. The backdrop is that the Hebrews have been defeated and enslaved by the Assyrians. It is a tale of privation, defeat, and despair. Here are a few snippets from Chapter 9 [KJV translation]:
The Lord shall set up the adversaries of [Syrian king] Rezin against him, and join his [Israel's] enemies together; The Syrians before, and the Philistines behind; and they shall devour Israel with open mouth. For all this his [God's] anger is not turned away, but his hand is stretched out still.
...The Lord shall have no joy in their [Israel's] young men, neither shall have mercy on their fatherless and widows: for every one is an hypocrite and an evildoer, and every mouth speaketh folly. For all this his [God's] anger is not turned away, but his hand is stretched out still.
... Through the wrath of the Lord of hosts is the land darkened, and the people shall be as the fuel of the fire: no man shall spare his brother. And he shall snatch on the right hand, and be hungry; and he shall eat on the left hand, and they shall not be satisfied: they shall eat every man the flesh of his own arm: Manasseh, Ephraim; and Ephraim, Manasseh [tribes of Israel]: and they together shall be against Judah [in Hebrew civil war]. For all this his [God's] anger is not turned away, but his hand is stretched out still.
And why is this happening? Chapter 1 explains why, and almost every chapter thereafter reminds us: because the Jews have done wrong.
Hear, O heavens, and give ear, O earth: for the Lord hath spoken,
I have nourished and brought up children, and they have rebelled against me.
The ox knoweth his owner, and the ass his master's crib:
but Israel doth not know, my people doth not consider.
Ah sinful nation, a people laden with iniquity,
a seed of evildoers, children that are corrupters:
they have forsaken the Lord, they have provoked the Holy One of Israel unto anger,
they are gone away backward.
[Isaiah 1:3-4, KJV]
The conquest and subjugation of the Hebrews by the Assyrians was a historical event, and these verses were written by a Hebrew priest within living memory of it. Moreover, the attitude expressed in the book of Isaiah is not a one-off; it is characteristic of Hebrew culture over long periods. The books of Ezekiel and Jeremiah were written over a hundred years later, under similar circumstances of defeat and enslavement for the Hebrews, this time by the Babylonians. In all three books -- Isaiah, Ezekiel, and Jeremiah -- the Hebrews humbly accept their fate of defeat and cruel exploitation as a penalty for the error of their ways. The book of Daniel, while focusing more on a single individual captive in enemy hands, takes the same tone of humility and forbearance in defeat.
So the Hebrews teach that they are God's chosen people, but they are not chosen to rule the Earth. God does that. The Hebrews are chosen to receive God's law and proclaim it to the world, and in doing that to be held to a higher standard -- being especially blessed when they do right, but also especially cursed when they do wrong. It turns out people of every sort, Hebrew or otherwise, do wrong often enough this is no enviable bargain. As Tevye (Jewish main character in "Fiddler on the Roof") said, I know, I know, we're the chosen people. But once in a while, could You choose someone else?
Now here is a riddle for you: How is the book of Isaiah like Hitler's Mein Kampf? Answer: Both are stories of national desolation and defeat, told poignantly by one of the defeated -- and both blame the Jews. The next chapter will compare Hitler's view of the international order with the pagan view on the one hand, and the Hebrew view on the other, as well as with that of the woke movement.
NelsonRushton
1mo ago
I haven't read this book
Good for you.
I hope he would have addressed the obvious objection that this creates a loop.
To understand why he doesn't think this way, you have to realize that in his worldview, the only kind of discrimination that needs to be remedied is discrimination against groups he favors, such as blacks. Discrimination against whites doesn't need to be remedied. So in his mind he is saying, the only remedy to past discrimination against blacks is present discrimination against whites. The only remedy to present discrimination against blacks is future discrimination against whites. No loop there. The discrimination against whites goes on forever, but for him that's not a loop; that's justice.
NelsonRushton
1mo ago
Lol. Not exactly a typo, but a calculation error. it should be 12% less, 44% vs 56%. Fixed now, thanks.
Oh, dang, I missed the Plato discussion.
Never too late.
This is a shame because I think you’re misreading a crucial part of it. Specifically here; the last time I made this argument (to @MaiqTheTrue) is here. In short, I think aging philosophers have been complaining about libertine, shiftless youth for literal millennia, but the predictions rarely come true. Athens was perfectly able to go to war, elect new leaders, corral its livestock, etc. up until they got subjugated by an outside tyrant. Though if you’ve made a case for the decline of virtue in Classical Athens, I’d be interested in seeing it.
Plato was clearly not saying that this (libertine-ness) was happening at the time he wrote The Republic. He was saying that it happens from time to time in various places, and that where it happens it is a symptom of coming tyranny. He had already lived through one such cycle in his 20's, and another one happened in Athens about 75 years after he wrote the Republic. It seemed to happen about every 100 years. Also, I do not accept the argument that the regime of the Thirty Tyrants had nothing to do with the moral fabric of Athens (see below). To elaborate on the words of Col. Jeff Cooper, armed men with moral courage cannot be easily tyrannized, and men with moral courage in the first place cannot easily be disarmed.
Athens was perfectly able to go to war, elect new leaders, corral its livestock, etc. up until they got subjugated by an outside tyrant.
Sometimes it was. Sometimes it wasn't. I'm not sure why you think Classical Athens was such a first world open society. Plato's Apology suggests that most people cooperated with the regime of the thirty tyrants as informers, as if the people of Athens, like Soviet Russia, was open to that sort of government by virtue of its failing values. The trial of Socrates happened in 399; that almost certainly a historical event, retold fairly accurately by Plato (since it is not contradicted by other sources, many of whom mention Socrates and were familiar with Plato's work). The trial related in The Apology not exactly a signal of a functioning democracy; it is a story of literally fatal cancel culture.
More importantly, the argument proves way too much. I could go down your tyrant checklist and fish for ways to make the prophecy fit Donald Trump, a textbook oligarch waving the flag of populism. Would that really be useful?
You could of course fish for that, or for an extended analogy between pinto beans and cardboard (they do kind of taste like cardboard, don't they?), or anything else you want to fish for. The trick is to actually do it -- and compare the two side by side. If you have the time I would be happy to see the results of your analogy with Trump.
This isn’t even your first time playing the lazy DRRR game.
Sorry. No idea what this means.
That makes it kind of pointless to draw your enemies as the soyjak.
Depends on how accurate the drawing is, and what other attempts to draw the same comparison you hold it next to. The details matter, and the control groups matter.
I wanted to discuss Plato because I think that post was a lot more interesting than this one.
Be my guest. I will respond to your replies to it (though they may not have a big audience)
You are not the first person to write an essay about how your opponents are Literally Hitler.
I didn't say anyone was literally Hitler. Please be smarter than this.
The Democrat agenda had thoroughly shifted by the Reagan years, and pretending otherwise is a cheap rhetorical trick.
This is beside the point. My point was that Byrd was forgiven for egregious racism in his distant past.
Also, I think you missed the salient point of the article on Plato. Plato obviously has a low opinion of the "democratic men" of his time, and was probably on the other side from them of the political aisle. Maybe they were right and he was wrong; that's perfectly possible and (note carefully that) I never made a claim about it. The main point is the resemblance between their agenda and that of modern progressives, which I find evidently uncanny.
Note:
This post is an installment of a book I am writing, under the working title They See not, which I am serializing as a series of posts on The Motte. The book is planned to be about the nature and common characteristics of populist tyrannical movements, especially focusing on the woke ideology, and how to combat them. The first two chapters were:
- Introduction: Past peak Woke? Don't count on it.
- Say then, my friend... Plato on Democracy and Tyranny
The third chapter is titled Victim Identity Politics and Wokeness.
Preface to Chapter 3
The radical progressive movement in the West today, aka wokeness, bears a striking resemblance to the populist tyrannical regime described by Plato in The Republic. Given that, one would expect wokeness to have more recent historical counterparts as well, and I will argue that it does. This chapter will examine parallels between today's woke movement and the early emergence of three major tyrannical regimes of the 20th century: Soviet communism, Chinese communism, and Nazism.
It is not surprising that wokeness looks and feels a good deal like communism -- since it is a common view that wokeness inhabits the far left, and communism is often thought of as the really far left. However, even in light of that, I will attempt to show that the historical parallels between wokeness on the one hand, and the early rise of Chinese and Soviet Communism on the other, run deeper than one might expect. It is perhaps even more surprising, as I will also argue, that many of these parallels also extend to the rise of Nazism -- which is commonly viewed as the opposite of communism, and as an ideology of the "far right". This following chapters will examine historical parallels in the emergence of all four of these ideologies (Soviet communism, Chinese communism, Nazism, and wokeness) along three lines: victim identity politics, authoritarianism, and extremism, defined as follows:
- victim identity politics is a caste system in which different moral standards are applied to people of different demographic groups, based on a narrative of historical class exploitation.
- authoritarianism is a sense of being entitled to control other people. This sense of entitlement engenders censorship, militance, lawlessness, and arbitrary, intrusive governance -- in particular, the use of government power to harass and silence political opponents.
- extremism is the embrace of policies and values that flagrantly defy reason and common sense.
Victim Identity Politics and Wokeness
(c) Feb 6, 2025, By J. Nelson Rushton
Divers weights, and divers measures, both of them are alike abomination to the Lord.
[Proverbs 20:10, KJV]
Diver's weights? Actually here, divers is an archaic spelling of diverse, meaning various and sundry. Of course different things have different weights and measures, but I think what is supposed to count as an abomination is different weights or measures for the same thing.
This phenomenon of diverse weights and diverse measures was brought home to me when -- somewhat to my chagrin, but also as the source of a few valuable life lessons -- I wound up rooming with a pot dealer for a few months when I was in graduate school. To be fair to him, my classified ad didn't specify "no drug dealers please" -- but, to be fair to me, he might have presumed on general principles that could be on my list of concerns, and given me a heads-up to see if it was a deal breaker. In any case, he didn't disclose his profession, and I didn't disclose a preference about that profession, and he moved in.
So one day my drug-dealing roomie has a client over and I am watching the deal happen in the living room. The dealer weighs out however many grams or ounces of pot was asked for, and then the customer pulls out his own scale, weighs the same lot again, and completes the transaction. Why the second weighing? The dealer isn't likely to have a broken scale; he buys and sells for a living. Aha!, I thought: Divers(e) weights and divers(e) measures! Evidently, it is a thing for particularly unscrupulous drug dealers to keep two scales in their pocket: one for buying and another one for selling -- and to pull out whichever one benefits him the most on each given occasion. That is the literal reading of the abomination in question -- though I suspect my pot-slinging roommate could plead ignorance on that score, not having not been much of a Bible reader at that stage of his life. Incidentally as it turns out, he is now, but that's another story.
Ѻ
I define victim identity politics as a caste system in which different moral standards are applied to people of different demographic groups, based on a narrative of historical class exploitation. The justification for woke victim politics was famously encapsulated by Ibram X. Kendi:
The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination. As President Lyndon B. Johnson said in 1965, “You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, ‘You are free to compete with all the others,’ and still justly believe that you have been completely fair.”
-- Ibram X. Kendi: How to Be an Antiracist
Here, Kendi is saying that (1) black people have been wrongfully oppressed by white people, in particular in America, throughout much of history, and that (2) the just and effective remedy for this offense is institutionalized discrimination in favor of blacks over whites, presumably until the books are balanced. One of those things is true. Kendi's argument seems to be based on a general principle that when one class of people has been systematically wronged by another class, each member of the offending group then owes each member of the offended group preferential treatment and reparations. But in the light of day, this view breaks down for two reasons: first, the woke don't really believe it, and, second, the principle itself is ridiculous.
The more you study it, the more you see that woke identity politics is not about keeping a ledger of historical injustices between groups and trying to balance the books; it is about keeping a ledger of historical injustices committed by groups that oppose the woke agenda, against groups that support the woke agenda, while conveniently ignoring all other patterns of predation and exploitation in the country and around the world. For example, the woke say that America owes blacks reparations for slavery. Maybe She does; around 450,000 blacks were brought to the United States and its original colonies in the Transatlantic slave trade, and their descendants held in bondage until the end of the Civil War in 1866 -- the total evil and suffering of which practice over time defy imagination or calculation. But on the other hand, over 1,000,000 whites were brought to the Mediterranean region in slavery by the Barbary pirates, and their descendants held in bondage until decades after the practice had been abolished in the United States, under circumstances no less brutal and probably worse. We hear indignant outcries by the woke for America to pay reparations to blacks -- but where are the cries for Morocco, Libya, or Turkey to pay reparations to whites and their families for their past enslavement and its deleterious and lasting effects? Of course there aren't any, because (1) the peoples of the Barbary Coast are not political opponents of the woke agenda, (2) group justice for ancient wrongs is a ridiculous idea in the first place, and (3) even if whites asked for reparations for their centuries of brutal oppression under North African slavery, as Thomas Sowell wrote, nobody is going to be fool enough to give it to them.
The woke would argue that, unlike the centuries-long slavery of whites in the Mediterranean, institutionalized discrimination against blacks in the United states is our problem, that it extends into living memory through the end of the Jim Crow era, and that its lasting effects are still felt by blacks today. And every word of that is true -- but if that is an outrage when it happens to some groups, shouldn't it be just as much of an outrage when it happens to others?
The raids of the Barbary pirates happened far away and long ago. But when it comes to alleged injustices by whites against non-whites, the woke certainly don't restrict attention to problems in our own back yard, or to problems that are currently going on. They fill the streets to protest the Israeli occupation of Palestine, wail angrily about the historical colonization of Africa by European powers like Belgium and Holland, and point their fingers over the long-ago British rule of India and the Spanish conquest of Central and South America -- all as if to say, look at all the terrible things white people have done. And they are right: white people have a lot of terrible things -- but so have other people, here in America and all around the world. Do the woke stigmatize the Japanese for their inhuman mistreatment of the people of Nanking and Korea during their subjugation under Hirohito? Do they lambast ethnic Hawaiians for the imperialism, slave driving, and brutality of King Kamehameha -- more recently than the American founding, and right in our own backyard? Are they calling for reparations to the Ute Indians for their epochs of enslavement and exploitation at the hands of the Navajo? And is anyone -- woke, Ute, or otherwise -- wagging their finger at modern day Navajos for those brutal crimes? Not at all. Not a peep. Why not?
Woke activists insist the United States should return the Black Hills region, in which Mount Rushmore is located, to the Sioux Indians -- from whom the United States seized it during the Black Hills War. And maybe we should: the Supreme Court ruled in 1960 that the United States owed the Sioux $106 million in return for the wrongful seizure of the Black Hills. But on the other hand, nobody -- neither the woke, nor the Supreme Court, nor anyone else -- is suggesting that the Sioux should pay reparations of any kind to the Cheyanne, who occupied the Black Hills for years before being driven out at the points of Sioux spears. Even the Cheyanne don't push that agenda; if they did, it would loose from Pandora's box the principle that people other than whites can be held individually and collectively responsible for the ancient wrongdoings of others of their race -- and nobody wants that.
To apply the principle of collective guilt to any group other than those targeted by the woke -- whites, and men, and especially white men -- sounds crazy. And it is crazy, but it is not less crazy for one group than it is for another. The fact that it has been normalized in our public conversation to do this selectively to certain groups shows how far down the woke rabbit hole our whole culture has fallen, and how far we have to go to drag ourselves out of it.
The "social justice" crowd claims that (1) blacks are negatively affected by the legacies of slavery and Jim Crow even today, and that (2) "systemic" racism continues to subtly permeate the fabric of our institutions, resulting in currents of racial prejudice that blacks must swim against -- and, therefore (3) policies and principles that discriminate against whites are necessary to "level the playing field". Claim #1 is certainly true, and I believe there is a good deal of truth to #2 -- but, again, does the social justice crowd go from #1 and #2 to #3 by the same logic for every group -- or are they pulling out diverse weights and diverse measures as it suits their political purposes?
If historical class maltreatment justifies present class favoritism, as Kendi claims to believe, then no group in modern history has earned it more than the Jews of Europe. If the Jews of Europe are not lagging economically, and are not overrepresented in Europe's prisons and poorhouses, should we conclude it is because, they have entirely escaped the effects of the brutal victimization that was historically aimed at them for thousands of years, to the point of attempted genocide almost within living memory? Or that all remnants of antisemitism have been completely extinguished from our institutional DNA and collective consciousness? Both claims are preposterous. If the Jews of Europe are doing better than the blacks of America, despite millennia of atrocious oppression and widespread lingering animus, it is only because the Jews of Europe do not act like fools as often as the Blacks of America. If blacks deserve officially sanctioned favoritism to level the playing field, on the argument that past discrimination requires it, then the Jews deserve such favoritism as much or mor. Of course that would only put the Jews farther ahead than they already are -- but, after all, a level playing field is a level playing field. Wouldn't the Jews be doing even better on a level playing field -- where they had never been persecuted and marginalized? So if the woke want to level the playing field, and if the only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination, where are the strident demands for reparations and affirmative action for Jews?
It seems that a level playing field is not what the woke really want after all. They are often accused instead of chasing the dream of equity, or equal outcomes, defined as equal average levels of success and failure, in all major measures of quality-of-life (educationally, economically, in criminal justice, etc.), for every demographic group. That would explain why they don't support affirmative action for Jews -- and why the remedy for past discrimination against them isn't current discrimination at all. Some of the more extreme SJWs, such as Kamala Harris, even admit to wanting equal outcomes for all groups. But do they really want that? Do they apply the principle of equal outcomes evenhandedly to different demographic groups, for each basic measure of success and quality of life? Or is this another case of diverse weights and measures?
One key demographic group that is woefully lagging in quality of life in America, and falling behind farther with every year, is the largest minority group in the country comprising 49.5% of the population: men. For example, a man in America is around four times more likely than a woman to be sent to prison for a violent felony. (Should we automatically conclude there could be no other reason for this than sexism in the criminal justice system?) Roughly four fifths of all suicides in America are by men, and the rate of suicide among men increased 28% between the years of 2000 and 2021. American men die of drug overdoses at two to three times the rate of women, and almost 70% of homeless people in America are men. Even among those American men who escape catastrophic events like a felony conviction or a fatal overdose, educational and economic attainment among men is in worrisome decline. Only 44% of the students now enrolled in four-year colleges in the United States are men -- 12% less than the figure for women -- and men are falling rapidly further behind in this key measure of achievement and future success. Among adult men in the US, the percentage who are not working and not looking for work increased 3-fold (from 4% to 12%) between 1960 and 2010 and continues to grow. A tiny handful of the growing cohort of non-working men are independently wealthy -- but the vast majority are either sponging off of their wife or girlfriend, living on handouts from of the state, panhandling and hustling to get by as homeless addicts, or making their living through some form of organized crime. Twelve percent of all adult men in America now fit that description -- roughly the same proportion of men that earn graduate degrees, while two thirds of graduate degrees now go to women. To put that a different way, a man in America today is only half as likely as a woman to get a graduate degree, and is as likely to be an indigent or dependent as he is to get that graduate degree. In summary, men have disproportionately bad outcomes in several major areas of life, and they are falling farther behind in these areas by the year.
If you have been paying attention to the political discourse of the times, you may have heard statistics like these about the plight of men in America. But even if you have heard of these gloomy trends and disparities, you will have rarely if ever heard calls for pro-male affirmative action to remedy them, or seen women blamed for them wholesale as a class -- especially by woke SJW's. If the woke want what they say they want and think what they say they think, reverse discrimination and narratives of class exploitation should be right up their ally. But in the case of men, what happened to equal outcomes? and what happened to class exploitation as the explanation for group differences in outcomes? And if not equal outcomes and class oppression, what the Hell happened to leveling the playing field?
So let's summarize. The woke agenda is to balance the books of historical class oppression -- but only to examine the entries in the entries in those books where white men did something wrong. And they want to level the playing field -- except that they are fine to leave it tilted against groups that are succeeding on their own merit. And they want the same outcomes for every group -- and to impose quotas, regulations, and subsidies to bring about equal outcomes for all groups -- except for a striking lack of interest in any program or policy that would help men catch up to women in major areas of quality-of-life such as education, housing, and mental health. Make sense?
Cui bono?
The woke ideology's ideology does make sense if you watch what they do instead of listening to what they say. What is going on is that the aim of leveling the playing field, and the narrative of class exploitation as the automatic explanation for why some groups outperform others, and even the quest for equal outcomes by group, were all lies in the first place. The pattern of which groups are demonized by the radical left and targeted for group guilt, and which group disparities and trends the woke crusade to fix with affirmative action and reparations, are as clear as the pattern of which crooked scale a drug dealer chooses to weigh out his pot, depending on whether he is buying or selling: it is a matter of cui bono.
The table below shows the political leanings of several major demographic groups in the United States, according to Pew Research polls conducted in 2024 [source1, source2]. The number in the right-hand column is the percentage who described themselves as leaning Democrat, minus the percentage who described themselves as leaning Republican -- so the higher the number, the greater the number of self-described Democrats in the group. The groups appear in the table from top to bottom, ranked by their affinity toward the Democratic party.
- black women: +74
- gay women: +71
- black men: +66
- gay men: +66
- Hispanic women: +28
- Hispanic men: +22
- white women: +10
- white men: -21
Whaddayaknow? If you only looked at the left hand column, you might think this was a chart of the woke victim status hierarchy from top to bottom. There are two salient explanations of what could be going on here. The woke explanation would be that America is institutionally rigged to favor the groups at the bottom, and the Democrats are the ones who are trying to level the playing field -- so of course the groups at the bottom, who don't want the playing field leveled, tend more to vote Republican. If it were remotely true that Democrats wanted to level the playing field, that might be plausible -- but I believe there is a simpler explanation that fits more of the facts. Like Plato's drones buzzing around the bema, the radical left wants to silence and marginalize its political opponents, whose identities fit the pattern in the table above, and part of the plan is to demonize them as historical class oppressors.
As an experiment to test this, you could ask what would happen if Latino men began voting Republican in larger numbers. My theory suggests that, since selectively enforced class-guilt narratives are a propaganda tool of the woke, we would see a sudden wellspring of woke narratives about Latinos as class oppressors. But that experiment has already been run. Over the course of the last several years, Latinos began moving to the right politically source, to the point that almost half voted for Trump in 2024. Now Google "racism against Latinos" on the one hand, and "Latino white supremacist" on the other, and check the dates and sources on the top twenty articles for both searches. It seems that Latinos were once portrayed copiously in woke outlets as historical class victims -- until around 2023 when stories began to emerge of a nefarious white supremacy movement in the Latino community. So, either Latinos began flocking to the Republican party because they shifted toward white supremacy, around the same time left-leaning pundits came to their senses and realized Latinos had never been class victims in the first place, or the woke propaganda machine began to pump out articles about Latino white supremacy to marginalize that group as soon as they began voting more like white men. You make the call.
It is often said that the woke ideology is unforgiving. That is said with good reason: people have been cancelled by the woke left, for example, for years-old drunken social media posts, that were objectively inoffensive in the light of reason, and that were inside the window of acceptability at the time they were made. People have even been cancelled for liking such posts -- and in England some have been arrested. And that is pretty unforgiving. But, on the other hand, senator Roberd Byrd was literally an officer of the Ku Klux Klan in his youth (an Exalted Cyclops, no less!), and he was never cancelled for that. At the time of Byrd's death, he was a powerbroker in the national politics of the Democratic party and a dependable supporter of the Democratic agenda (the latter of which was no change; the Klan has always been dominated by Democrats). At his funeral, Byrd was lovingly eulogized by Democrats including President Barack Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, Governor Joe Manchin, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi, Senator Jay Rockefeller, Representative Nick Rahall, Victoria Reggie Kennedy, and former president Bill Clinton. So they aren't that unforgiving after all -- as long as you are squarely on their team. Diverse weights and diverse measures.
There is a second, less subtle reason whites would naturally appear at the bottom of the woke caste hierarchy. Suppose, for the sake of argument, that you wanted to form a political movement -- not for the purpose of achieving any real aim of social justice, but just to plunder the wealth of an opportunistically selected class of people through the apparatus of the state. Who would be the most natural targets of such a scheme? the same as the natural targets for any other sort of robbery: the ones with the most money. This pattern dates back to the time of Plato, as he noted:
Then there is another class which is always being severed from the mass. They are the orderly class, which in a nation of traders sure to be the richest. They are the most squeezable persons and yield the largest amount of honey to the drones.
-- Plato: The Republic, Book VIII
The pattern has repeated itself with the targeting of industrialists, aristocrats, and land-owning farmers (the "bourgeoisie") in the communist revolutions of Russia, China, Cuba, Vietnam, Cambodia, Ethiopia, and Yugoslavia, to name a few -- and with the targeting of Jews in Germany, Tutsis in Rwanda, Tamils in Sri Lanka, Igbos in Nigeria, and Christians in Lebanon to name a few more. In every case named here, and many others not named, a disproportionately successful demographic group was demonized as a historical exploiter class and targeted for persecution and plunder, ending in tyranny, and in several cases genocide. Some of these groups, without a doubt, had histories of predatory exploitation of their countrymen -- and some of them, without a doubt, did not. But in no case did the persecution and plunder solve the problems of the alleged victim classes that perpetrated them. In each case, on the contrary, it affected a catastrophe for everyone involved. It turns out that the alleged historical exploiter class, even when it actually is exploitative, is almost never the problem at the root of lagging outcomes for less fortunate groups.
The final reason why whites would find their place at the bottom of the woke caste system is the simplest of all. Whether the targets are whites, or Jews, or aristocrats, or industrialists, or Tutsis, or Tamils, or Igbos, or somebody else, when people are hurting and hungry, it is easy to get them to hate others who have more than them, to churn this hatred into an ideology, and then to mill that ideology into a political regime. That is the nature of the game of modern-day tyranny -- from Mugabe to Khomeini, from Lenin to Hitler, and in scores of other cases. Many of the class-exploitation narratives leveraged by tyrannical regimes of the 20th century had truth to them; some had smaller threads of truth, and some were utter fabrications. But no good came of the victim identity politics in any case; it is a murderous plague, plain and simple. There is a crucial difference between, on the one hand, remembering who did what to whom with an eye toward preventing it from happening again, and, on the other hand, saying, "...so let's do it back to them." Doing it back to them is the message Xendi expressed with such force and poetry, and his expression of that message -- the toxic, two-faced message of modern tyranny -- is the reason he has been elevated as a spokesman for the woke movement.
Conclusion
It is a natural question why, if wokeness functions largely a pretext for class warfare to demonize white people and redistribute their wealth, so many college-educated whites have nonetheless become infected with the woke mind virus. I will return to this question in detail in a later chapter, but the basic answer is that, in a tragedy of commons orchestrated by the woke censorship-indoctrination complex, it behooves them as individuals to be part of the problem in the large -- something like it behooved Uncle Tom. Doesn't it behoove you, at the very least to play along and keep your mouth shut? Playing along and keeping your mouth shut under tyranny is what Nobel laureate Czesław Miłosz, in his book The Captive Mind, called ketman. Ketman is a dangerous game: you can only pretend to be something for so long, before you start to become what you pretend to be. Even if you continue to secretly and silently resist being changed by one-sided propaganda pouring out of our major institutions, the young people around you, who only hear one side of the argument voiced by authority figures in public, will presume that side is just and right, and that it is an offense to their community to question or deviate from it. Our cowering in silence, even in silent resistance, explains why our children are getting away from us.
The following chapters will discuss victim identity politics under Lenin, Hitler, and Mao Zedong.
Funny, that was going to be my argument, too (except for the word "tripe").
I think Thomas Sowell is hands down the most notable right-leaning political thinker of our lifetime, and Conflict of Visions is Sowell's favorite Sowell book. I hope you'll read it if you haven't.
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