NelsonRushton
Doctorate in mathematics, specializing in probability theory, from the University of Georgia. 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
NelsonRushton
5mo ago
It really kind of baffles me to imagine how they think that's actually supposed to work.
IMO this is the million dollar question. I think they are spoiled children grown up, and they absolutely take for granted the peace and prosperity "just happen" in an effortless, stable equilibrium. They think the only thing mucking it up is a few bad apples, and that if we can just put bullets in the backs of those people's heads we will get back to the Garden of Eden.
I don't really know what things were like in the 1910s Russia. Maybe the Tsars really were both incompetent and authoritarian themselves, and industry may have been dominated by a clique-ish elite who hoarded the wealth and kept the working-class down.
Basically, all of this is true. In particular, the use of Russian working-class men as cannon fodder in World War I, the inhuman conditions they lived under while at war, and the indifference of the upper classes to any of this, created morbid resentment among the lower classes toward the upper. While the common soldiers had to live under ghastly conditions of privation, cold, lice, disease, and lack of medical care, they witnessed first-hand the relatively cushy lives of the officers, and even more cushy lives of the commanders. It resonates with the American situation in Vietnam, where, because of the college draft deferment, working class and underclass men were often sent abroad to risk their lives for values held more closely by the upper classes. It also resonates with Plato's description of how the working classes lose respect for the rich when they serve side by side in war:
And often rulers and their subjects may come in one another's way, whether on a pilgrimage or a march, as fellow-soldiers or fellow-sailors; aye, and they may observe the behaviour of each other in the very moment of danger --for where danger is, there is no fear that the poor will be despised by the rich --and very likely the wiry sunburnt poor man may be placed in battle at the side of a wealthy one who has never spoilt his complexion and has plenty of superfluous flesh --when he sees such an one puffing and at his wit's end, how can he avoid drawing the conclusion that men like him are only rich because no one has the courage to despoil them? [The Republic, VIII]
The question is how to move forward from it. The Russians picked the wrong answer. Dead wrong.
Ask a progressive who is killing blacks, and they will inevitably say it is police who are responsible for black deaths.
Do you think this is a reasonable opinion? I think it is preposterous and obviously so. It is understandable for a single person in isolation to hold this opinion tentatively and weakly, but opinions aren't formed in isolation. If woke progressives actually cared about the health and safety of black people, some of them would find out for themselves that this isn't true; they would make noise about it because it is important; the people who hear that noise would make noise, and it would go viral. And/or the pundits whose job it is to know would find the truth of the matter and amplify it. What goes viral in a community is a function of the values of that community. If they cared, they would know; they don't know; ergo they don't care.
Black lives matter, ... or so you say
Radical progressives and law enforcement
Once when I was visiting my brother-in-law in Vietnam, I noticed his six year old son had picked up a stick off the ground and was playing solder with it. The little boy pretended the stick was a pump action shotgun, pointing it at one thing after another: click-clack-BANG... click-clack-BANG. I got his attention and, with my wife as a translator, showed and told him that the correct technique is to cycle the gun while it is in recoil, before acquiring the next target: BANG-click-clack,... BANG-click-clack. He tried it a few times and then looked to me, and I gave him a smile and a thumbs-up.
A few minutes later, the boy's father (my brother-in-law) warned me not to teach him things like that -- because if he repeats them at school, his family might get an unpleasant visit from the police. I apologized for the mistake and made sure not to repeat it. A few minutes later, my brother-in-law mentioned that his motorcycle had been stolen the week before. I asked him if he had reported it to the police and he said no; they wouldn't do anything about it. In a Marxist police state, that's not what the police are for.
In the United States today, a black person is about seven times more likely to be murdered than a white person, and murder is the leading cause of death among black males under 45. The problem of a high murder rate for blacks in the US is not new, but while it has received little media attention, that rate has skyrocketed over the last ten years. The rate of homicide against blacks increased by around 50% from 2014 to 2020 and has remained near the 2020 level up to the time of this writing. This translates to about 19,000 excess black homicide deaths from 2015 to 2023, over and above what would have occurred if the 2014 rate had continued. That is more than the number of black Americans killed in World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War combined, in less time than the total duration of those three wars. Something changed in 2015 that is having the effect of a war on black people in America.
The public conversation about the epidemic of killings of blacks in America looks like something this: some researchers, such as Roland Fryer and Heather Macdonald, along with many if not most conservative thinkers on the subject, have argued that the sudden increase in the rate of black homicide is largely a result of the "Ferguson effect" -- in which police officers are reluctant to patrol and intervene in majority-black neighborhoods because of hostility toward police fomented by "Black Lives Matter" activists. Progressives, in response, say that the causal theory of the Ferguson effect is not true. If we step back and look at the debate, no matter which side one takes, what is striking is that it is generally the conservatives who begin the conversation about the problem. Homicide is the leading cause of death for black males under 45, and has increased dramatically in a short period of time -- and yet the very people who angrily shout that "Black lives matter" have little to say about the issue until they are pinned down on it by people on the other side of the political fence. What gives?
What gives, I believe, is twofold. First, Fryer and Macdonald are obviously correct: what do you expect to happen when you demoralize, and in many cases defund, the police -- and who do you expect it to happen to? Second, I submit that their silence on this issue demonstrates that woke progressives do not actually care about the safety of black people -- any more than Lenin cared about the safety of Russian proletariat. What they care about is the power-gathering narrative that white supremacy is the root of all evil. Black-on-black crime doesn't do much to advance that narrative, and so it is not of much interest to them, no matter how many black lives it takes, or how rapidly the problem grows.
But where did the ridiculous idea of abolishing the police come from in the first place? In fact, the dismantling of law enforcement by radical progressives is nothing new. In the fourth century BC, Plato described a political faction whose agenda included moral relativism, sexual liberation, open borders, treating aliens like citizens, redistribution of wealth, debt cancellation, silencing dissenting speech, the lax enforcement of criminal laws, and, finally, stripping private citizens of the right to bear arms. Sound familiar? Plato's name for this group was demokratiko ántras (Greek: democratic men), and he wrote that when a state is governed by such men, convicted criminals are free to walk the streets. He also wrote that such a state it is on the precipice of tyranny [The Republic, VIII]. In two previous Substack posts (here and here), I have written in more detail about the correspondence between Plato's narrative and the woke agenda.
The gutting of pre-existing law enforcement structures was also a common theme in the communist revolutions in both Russia and China -- though in China, the focus was on prosecutors and judges rather than police officers. I will discuss the Russian case in more detail below. In any case, it seems that going back to the time Plato, the playbook of leftist tyranny has included the following essential steps:
- Dismantle the existing structures of law enforcement;
- confiscate weapons owned by private citizens;
- establish a secret police force to terrorize political opponents.
The secret of the "secret police" is that they are not really police at all, but a gang of thugs who operate by whatever rules they invent as they go, and whose purpose is to terrorize and silence ideological opponents of the ruling party. Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia said that on paper, the Soviet Union had a bill of rights that was better than the American bill of rights, adding "I mean it literally. It was much better" [source]. But the Soviet bill of rights didn't matter, because, in the Soviet Union, there was no de facto remedy for the violation of one's de jure rights. Indeed, a state terror organization like the Cheka or KGB cannot possibly operate alongside an organization that actually enforces the law. Thus, if it isn't really black lives that matter, but establishing a one-party police state, then abolishing the (pre-existing) police is not such a stupid idea after all. On the contrary, it is the first step in a proven plan with a long tradition!
Lenin's Abolition of the Police
Recall that in 1902 Lenin wrote,
The Social-Democrat's ideal should not be the trade union secretary, but the tribune of the people, who is able to react to every manifestation of tyranny and oppression, no matter where it appears, no matter what stratum or class of the people it affects; who is able to generalize all these manifestations and produce a single picture of police violence and capitalist exploitation; who is able to take advantage of every event, however small, in order to set forth before all his socialist convictions and his democratic demands, in order to clarify for all and everyone the world-historic significance of the struggle for the emancipation of the proletariat. [Lenin (1902): "What is to be done?"]
In a previous post, I discussed how Lenin urged his followers to blame class exploitation for every problem in the world (and also, to view everything as a problem, even if it was never a problem before). In this article, I would draw the reader's attention to Lenin's description of the enemy that is to blame for all these problems, large and small: a single picture of police violence and capitalist exploitation. For Lenin, the class enemy of the bourgeoisie was intimately tied with the institutions of law enforcement.
The police forces that existed in Russia before the revolution were under the command of the Tsar, and included a repressive political police force as well as ordinary law enforcement. But in his picture of "police violence and capitalist exploitation", Lenin didn't distinguish between the two. In the Marxist view, ownership of private property was theoretically illegitimate in the first place -- and so the police's role in preventing Bolsheviks and their constituents from stealing money and other valuables that they wanted to steal (or "expropriate", as they put it) was, in their view, a form of oppression. The revolutionaries further regarded laws against assaulting whomever they wanted to assault as a form of oppression: after all their targets were capitalist bourgeoisie exploiters, or alleged to be as part of the justification of the would-be crime, and murder and theft were just what they had coming.
Lenin had advocated open war on the police for years leading up to the 1917 revolution. For example in 1905 he wrote,
Practical work, we repeat, should be started at once. This falls into preparatory work and military operations. The preparatory work includes procuring all kinds of arms and ammunition, securing premises favorably located for street fighting -- convenient for fighting from above, for storing bombs and stones, etc., or acids to be poured on the police, etc., etc.
...To launch attacks under favorable circumstances is not only every revolutionary’s right, but his plain duty. The killing of spies, policemen, gendarmes, the blowing up of police stations, the liberation of prisoners, the seizure of government funds for the needs of the uprising — such operations are already being carried out wherever insurrection is rife, in Poland and in the Caucasus, and every detachment of the revolutionary army must be ready to start such operations at a moment’s notice. [Lenin (1905): "Tasks of Revolutionary Army Contingents"]
Lenin knew that his regime would not be able to operate as planned alongside the existing system of courts and police. On the eve of the October 1917 revolution, he wrote,
The liberation of the oppressed class is impossible not only without a violent revolution, but also without the destruction of the apparatus of state power which was created by the ruling class. [Lenin (1917): “The State and Revolution”]
But what would function in place the “apparatus of state power”? This would be the subject of a diabolical bait-and-switch. Before coming to power, Lenin called for abolition of the police and their replacement by a collective of armed citizens [Lenin (1917): "Tasks of the Proletariat in our Revolution"]. Lenin's followers probably imagined something along the lines of the CHAZ autonomous zone created by BLM activists in Seattle in 2020. Lenin probably laughed to himself and imagined the Cheka.
As the revolution unfolded, the Bolsheviks initially delivered on their promise to abolish the police, including both the Okhrana (Tsarist secret police) and regular law enforcement. Not only were the existing police departments wiped out as government agencies; the 1918 Soviet constitution revoked the right to vote for all former police officers -- along with other alleged class exploiters, including clergymen, former business owners, and anyone deemed "selfish or dishonorable" by the Soviet authorities:
The following persons enjoy neither the right to vote nor the right to be voted for, even though they belong to one of the categories enumerated above [as having the right to vote], namely:
- Persons who employ hired labor in order to obtain from it an increase in profits.
- Persons who have an income without doing any work, such as interest from capital, receipts from property, etc.
- Private merchants, trade and commercial brokers.
- Monks and clergy of all denominations.
- Employees and agents of the former police, the gendarme corps, and the Okhrana [Czar’s secret police], also members of the former reigning dynasty.
- *Persons who have in legal form been declared demented or mentally deficient, and also persons under guardianship. *
- Persons who have been deprived by a Soviet of their rights of citizenship because of selfish or dishonorable offenses, for the period fixed by the sentence.
The 1918 Soviet constitution further stipulated that "all workers be armed, and that a Socialist Red Army be organized, and the propertied class be disarmed". The collective of armed citizens was off to a good start, at least on paper, but this clause was also the beginning of gun control in the Soviet Union. In the initial phase, the Soviet government only disarmed their intended victims at the time, which consisted of people in categories designated as bourgeois.
Eventually, however, the entire civilian population would be disarmed, and the entire civilian population would also become victims or potential victims -- since anyone, at any time, might do something the authorities deemed "selfish or dishonorable" -- such as say something that the Soviet government did not want other citizens to hear, even if saying it was OK to say and hear the day before. In 1924, all private citizens, bourgeois and proletarian alike, were stripped of the right to own pistols and rifles, and private gun ownership was restricted to shotguns -- which were required to be licensed and registered, and could only be owned for the purpose of hunting. In 1939, the Soviet government confiscated all privately owned firearms. So much for a collective of armed citizens.
The wave of criminal savagery that ensued following the October 1917 revolution was beyond comprehension for most Westerners today. It is difficult to isolate the effect of Lenin's abolition of the police on this crime wave, because a civil war commenced in which atrocities including mass looting and, mass murder, and mass rape were routinely committed on both sides. However, within two months of the Bolshevik coup d'etat in October 1917, Lenin formed the Cheka -- the secret police agency of the Soviet Union that would later evolve into the KGB. So much for abolishing the police.
NelsonRushton
5mo ago
I am extremely skeptical of Dreher's claim to skepticism here.
I'm convinced. I changed it to "Dreher had good reason to be skeptical".
It is also, incidentally, what in my view makes Live Not By Lies such a tedious and intellectually sterile book - most of LNBL is just Dreher describing something in the USSR, then describing something in 21st century America which does not particularly resemble it, and then asserting that they're the same.
I don't think this characterization of "Most of the book" is accurate. That is what I expected the book to be from review and interviews, but I found that most of it consisted of stories of Eastern Bloc dissidents and their advice to fellow dissidents. Little of the text, after the introduction, refers to concrete events happening in America.
No matter what you agree with or disagree with in theory, I think it is worth reading for the stories of the dissidents alone, and I can't imagine describing it as "tedious" or "sterile". The book actually set me up for a serious change in my worldview. It so happened that I read Dreher's Live Not by Lies and Hazony's Conservatism back-to-back. Dreher's book convinced me that (1) leftist tyranny operates in a certain, seemingly strange manner, and (2) effective resistance to tyranny consists of living out certain principles -- but it did not explain why either of those things were the case. Then I read Hazony, and it was like reading Newton's Principia after studying Galileo's laws of gravity and Kepler's laws of orbital mechanics: Aha! This is the fundamental reason why this is this way and that is that way! I don't think any reading has ever changed (in my opinion, clarified) my worldview so much, so quickly.
On the other hand, I am also skeptical of Dreher's report about how his interviews unfolded, and I toned it down in my secondhand report. For example, where he said he talked to "many" (without saying how many), immigrants I said "several"; and I carefully claim that According to Dreher they all said yes [they see parallels], instead of claiming in my own voice that they all said yes and citing him. My guess is that his report is essentially true in its critical mass, but puffed up. FWIW the two Russian immigrants I know say the same thing.
NelsonRushton
5mo ago
As an aside, when I checked on the Julianne Hough thing, it appears she was immediately attacked and released an apology. While the pushback looks tame by 2020s standards, it’s not exactly ignoring the event, is it? Leaves me a little skeptical of your other links.
ah, darn. I did not see any stories about that prior to 2021 but couldn't find the date of the actual apology. I will have to replace that with another example when I have time. In the meantime, I just deleted the paragraph. Thanks for the catch.
With that said…doesn’t this argument work a little too well?
I don't think so. Every tribe, indeed every person, does that a little, and a few fundamentalist members of every tribe do it a lot -- but some tribes do it more often, with more severity than others. When the frequency and severity are categorically greater in one case than another, it makes for a categorical distinction. There was a real surge of this in the McCarthy era, which can be compared qualitatively to what Marxists themselves do -- but you would have to multiply the intensity of McCarthyism at least 10, and maybe 100, get something comparable with the Soviet version. Note, for example, that Lenin actually said to look for the action of the class enemy in "every event no matter how small". It's hard to imagine Reagan, or any other American president, saying any such thing.
At the fringe, there exist people who see the communist menace everywhere (as Bob Dylan wrote, red stripes on the American flag!), but I don't think there are enough of them to put that tribe in the same category with Soviet communism or wokeness in that regard. Dylan's satire is humorous precisely because real (right wing) Americans have never been that silly in any significant numbers; but it's hard these days to write satire that is crazier than SJW's actually are (or the Bolsheviks actually were). Hence, The Bee or Not the Bee.
NelsonRushton
5mo ago
Aye. Fixed now. Thanks for the catch.
Grandmother, what big teeth you have!
Part 3: Class oppression, everywhere, all the time
(Note: This is the third in a series of posts about parallels between Soviet communism and Western wokeism. The first two installments, on the issues of identity politics and censorship respectively, can be found here and here).
In 1902, Vladimir Lenin wrote,
The Social-Democrat's ideal should not be the trade union secretary, but the tribune of the people, who is able to react to every manifestation of tyranny and oppression, no matter where it appears, no matter what stratum or class of the people it affects; who is able to generalize all these manifestations and produce a single picture of police violence and capitalist exploitation; who is able to take advantage of every event, however small, in order to set forth before all his socialist convictions and his democratic demands, in order to clarify for all and everyone the world-historic significance of the struggle for the emancipation of the proletariat. [Lenin (1902): "What is to be done?"]
This passage invokes two themes that would become part of the fabric of Soviet totalitarianism. First, Lenin presents us with an all-encompassing bogeyman -- described here as capitalist exploitation but usually referred to as bourgeois ideology -- that is associated with a particular class of people, who are held collectively responsible for every injustice that exists in the world. Second, the infernal influence of this class enemy is to be looked for and found in every event, no matter how small. Thus, Lenin urges his followers to see the specter of bourgeois oppression, not just events that would normally be seen as tyrannical and oppressive, but also in things that would, to the untrained eye, be seen as innocent and ordinary.
This article will discuss how these themes played out in Soviet communism, and, in parallel, how they are present in the modern "woke" cancel culture. The motivating impulse of both worldviews can be summarized as follows: every problem is class oppression, and everything is a problem, even if it was never a problem before. For Soviet communism, the invisible, omnipresent oppressor was bourgeois ideology, while for the woke it is white supremacy.
Every problem is class oppression
In Spring of 2015, journalist Rod Dreher received a call from a distraught stranger. The caller said that his mother, an elderly immigrant from Czechoslovakia, was warning him more and more urgently that current events in the United States reminded her of the emergence of communism in her home country in the 1940's. Dreher had good reason to be skeptical; if the world had really been going to Hell for as long as old people have been saying the world is going to Hell, we'd have been there by now. Yet, there was something about the caller's tone that stuck in his mind and made him keep asking himself, What if the old Czech woman sees something the rest of us do not? [Dreher (2020): Live Not By Lies. p. xi]. So Dreher decided to follow up. He found out and interviewed several American immigrants who had formerly lived behind the "iron curtain" of Eastern Bloc communism, and asked them if they felt that the United States was moving toward the sort of totalitarianism that they had experienced in their home countries. According to Dreher, every one of them said yes [ibid, p. xi].
Among the Eastern Bloc immigrants that Dreher interviewed, one parallel they noted was radical identity politics: an agenda of collective punishment for an alleged exploiter class, who was held to blame for everything wrong with the world. For example, in the Soviet Union, frequent shortages of food, cloth, and other goods -- which largely resulted from government planning of the economy -- were routinely blamed on bourgeois saboteurs (vrediteli) by the government-run media. In particular, the first three decades of communist rule saw three major famines in the Soviet Union, beginning respectively in 1921, 1932, and 1946. In reality these resulted largely from government mismanagement, and the 1932 famine was engineered by the Soviet government as part of a terror campaign against Ukrainian farmers -- but all three famines were blamed by the government-run media on bourgeois sabotage (vreditel'stvo). The heavy Russian losses in the Russo-Japanese war and World War I were also blamed, not just on the Tsar, but on every member of Soviet society who had formerly owned property -- another manifestation of bourgeois oppression. The outbreak of typhus in the early 1920's was also blamed by the Soviets on (you guessed it!) bourgeois oppression.
The suffering of working-class Russians leading up to the revolution was very real, very severe, and very unjust from a modern perspective. In fact, as recently as 1860 — less than sixty years before the Bolshevik revolution — about 3 in 10 Russians had lived under by serfdom, which was significantly more oppressive than European serfdom and legally comparable to slavery. The hard question was how to move forward. The answer Lenin offered was indiscriminate collective vengeance, enforced by government despotism, financed by plunder, and motivated by group hatred -- and the first step in the plan of collective vengeance and plundering was to blame the historical exploiter class for everything.
The situation in America is in some ways analogous to that in Russia a hundred years ago. Anti-black racism and slavery are moral stains on our American heritage. Moreover, serious de jure discrimination against blacks in America falls within living memory; less than 70 years have passed since Rosa Parks’s famous refusal to move to the back of the bus in Montgomery, Alabama. Pockets of de facto discrimination remain with us, and the legacy of past discrimination is broad and deep. Just as it was in Russia a hundred years ago, the hard question is how to move forward. The woke answer is Lenin’s answer. Substitute "white supremacy" for "bourgeois oppression" and you have the motivating spirit of the woke mindset -- and, once again, the first step in the plan of collective vengeance and plundering is to blame the historical exploiter class for everything.
White supremacy sometimes goes by the seemingly less inflammatory name of "racism" -- but in the woke view, only white people can be racist; so the two are interchangeable from the woke perspective. On the woke view, blacks suffer from high blood pressure and influenza because of white supremacy. White supremacy is also at work in the deleterious effects of climate change. High crime rates in black neighborhoods are caused by white supremacy, and when a black suspect dies in the custody of five black police officers, that's white supremacy, too. The January 6 attack on the Capital Building was fueled by white supremacy, even for members of the mob who were black or Hispanic. Twenty years ago, the existence of a black white-supremacist was a motif for a comedy sketch; today it's an axiom of woke ideology.
And everything is a problem
There didn't have to be a war, or a famine, or a disease -- or even anything palpably wrong -- in order for Soviet communists to heap blame on the bourgeoisie. Lenin urged his followers to look for the tentacles of bourgeois oppression in every event, no matter how small, and they generally obliged. By and by, the Soviet communists would classify anything that offended their sensibilities in the least -- from Christianity to quantum mechanics to kitchens (sic.) -- as incarnations of bourgeois oppression. That's right: kitchens were considered by the soviets to be bourgeois -- because they were emblems of the historical relegation of women to the role of housework (the Soviets planned for everyone to eat in public cafeterias, though the plan was never implemented).
Imagine a person who has been indoctrinated to see capitalist exploitation and police violence in every event, no matter how small -- from a grand catastrophe to a kitchen. If you find that difficult to imagine, it might help to visit a college campus in today's America. The woke concept of "microaggressions" is the new fashion on American campuses -- and if that fashion does not trace its roots directly to the Leninist playbook, it is at least the work of the same demons. For example, official guidelines at UCLA give the following examples of racist microaggressions:
- asking "Where are you from?"
- saying, “There is only one race: the human race.”
- saying, "I believe the most qualified person should get the job.”
- saying that affirmative action is racist
- saying, “Of course he’ll get tenure, even though he hasn’t published much—he’s Black!”
Microaggression example #5 above is a caricatured way of saying that black faculty members receive favorable race-based treatment in hiring and promotion. During my 20 or so years in academia in Texas, I saw this done openly and universally, even though it was technically against state law. At UCLA, it is not only openly done, but evidently required -- since microaggressions #3 and #4 say it would be racist to oppose the policy. On the other hand, example #5 says that it is also a racist microaggression to say that blacks and other minorities receive preferential treatment. This means that at UCLA -- the flagship public university of the largest state in the US -- the only way to avoid being labeled as a racist is to (1) support the policy of racial preferences in hiring and promotion, and, (2) while advocating that policy, deny that it exists. UCLA is not an outlier in this; similar lists (or the very same one) are officially circulated at many if not most major US institutions of higher learning -- including, for example, Harvard, UNC-Chapel Hill, and my undergraduate alma mater Auburn University. Is that crazier than asserting that quantum mechanics and kitchens are manifestations of bourgeois oppression? Hard to say.
... Even if it was never a problem before
Another theme Dreher heard repeatedly from those who had lived under communism was the ever-changing, ever-expanding reach of what is seen as class-enemy oppression. What counted as acceptable speech, vocabulary and behavior changed so quickly and dramatically that one never knew when "Those in power will come after you as a villain for having said or done something that was perfectly fine the day before" [ibid, p. xii].
In the Soviet Union, what counted as loyal party obedience one day might be considered bourgeois subversion the next. Leon Trotsky, who led the 1905 revolution along with Lenin, was himself assassinated by the Soviet regime in 1940. It is not that Trotsky had changed his views; on the contrary, Trotsky's counterrevolutionary subversion consisted of not changing his views fast enough to keep up with the party line. Several other major central figures of the Bolshevik revolution -- including Pyotr Voykov, Filipp Goloshchyokin Alexander Beloborodov, and Boris Didkovsky -- all met similar fates, along with many minor figures, as well as countless ordinary people, all caught in the gears of evolving standards of party loyalty.
Woke cancel culture, while not nearly as deadly as its Soviet predecessor, operates with similarly shifting standards. For example, in 2008, tech entrepreneur Brendan Eich donated $1000 to support California Proposition 8 -- a ballot initiative designed to keep marriage in California only between opposite-sex couples. For context, gay marriage was not yet legal in California at the time, so Eich's view was arguably mainstream. Eich's view had certainly been mainstream four years earlier, when Barack Obama said, in an interview on Chicago public television, that "Marriage is between a man and a woman". Both Obama and Joe Biden were publicly opposed to gay marriage until 2012, and Hillary Clinton was opposed to gay marriage until 2013. Yet in 2013, just as leading Democrats were publicly evolving to a more liberal position on the issue, Brendan Eich was forced to resign from the board of the Mozilla corporation as a result of the sudden outrage against him for supporting the California ballot proposition five years earlier. Gotta’ keep up, Brendan!
So publicly opposing gay marriage suddenly became politically incorrect — very politically incorrect, to the point where it warrants pressuring someone to resign from their position on a company board — within 12 months after the most prominent progressive leaders first began to publicly support gay marriage. In 2014, saying that all lives matter — a phrase that would have once sounded progressive, and still did as far as she knew — Smith College President Kathleen McCartney felt the need to publicly apologize for having used the phrase in an email (gotta’ keep up, Kathleen!). When NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick first refused to stand for the American National Anthem, it was a bold move for which he received considerable pushback; but in 2020, when fellow quarterback Drew Brees criticized the idea of kneeling for the anthem, not only did he feel the need to issue a groveling apology to assuage the woke mob, but his wife Brittany did too, writing,
We are the problem…To say ‘I don’t agree with disrespecting the flag,’ I now understand was also saying I don’t understand what the problem really is, I don’t understand what you’re fighting for, and I’m not willing to hear you because of our preconceived notions of what that flag means to us.
Gotta’ keep up, Brittany!
Some authors have suggested that cancel culture -- collective punishment of an alleged class oppressor, over seemingly insignificant things, with rapidly shifting standards -- began in the 1990's. The fact is that it is not new, but, as is sometimes said of a pre-owned vehicle, it is just new to us. On the other hand, the Eastern Bloc expatriates that Dreher interviewed found it eerily familiar. I suppose they were acquainted with the previous owners.
And saying any of those things, I would expect Blues to disagree vociferously on all counts and throw out all sorts of reasons why I was wrong and uncharitable.
Among the books he wrote, Thomas Sowell said that his favorite is A Conflict of Visions. I believe the theory put forward in that book best explains this observation.
The factors that determine which side of a political fence we are on are not based on dialectic; they adhere mainly at the level of one's vision of the world -- the way one sees things -- which consists of categories and concepts and their semantics, along with values and biases (aka, in Bayesian terms, priors). If we do not start from the same set of categories, concepts, and semantics, it doesn't even make sense to talk in terms of starting from the same set of facts, let alone the same values and biases. A vision acts a stage upon which the play of dialectic is put on. If two people share a vision they can participate in profitable dialectic with each other; and if they do not, they cannot.
But this doesn't mean it the situation is hopeless. Most persuasive dialogue outside of academia is, in fact, not dialectic but proselytization, aimed at massaging the listener's vision: their categories, concepts, semantics, priors, and values -- things that have no truth conditions and thus admit no logical or empirical arguments. This sort of dialog is the only kind that can promulgate or harmonize the visions of a community. Unfortunately, Enlightenment thinkers generally scoff at it. Frankly, in large part so do the Motte and other "rationality" communities on both the left and right -- labeling it as "fuzzy thinking", "superstition", "indoctrination", etc. Thus, as C.S. Lewis wrote, "We remove the organ and demand the function... we castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful." Good luck with that.
NelsonRushton
5mo ago
When it comes to prosecuting the highest-level politicians, I would use this rule of thumb: If you explained the crime in a few sentences to George Washington, would he say, "what? I don't even understand why that is a crime
Great post. I wish you would post more.
NelsonRushton
5mo ago
Ideally they would be welcome in a muslim country. They could go to Egypt. No wait Egypt has a fortified barrier with Gaza -- more heavily fortified than their border with Israel -- to keep them out of Egypt. They could immigrate to Lebanon. No wait they were kicked out of Lebanon for inciting terrorism. They could go to Jordan. No wait they were kicked out of Jordan for inciting terrorism. Maybe they could to Kuwait. No wait they were kicked out of Kuwait for inciting terrorism. I'd say they can go to hell but they would probably be kicked out of there too.
NelsonRushton
5mo ago
Lost all credibility for me when he said that of there was a Palestinian state that the fighting would stop. "From the river to the sea Palestine will be free" means the entire area of what is now israel will be "free" of Jews. And where are these Jews supposed to go? It says in hamas's 1988 charter where they are supposed to go (to their graves) and they have never changed their tune. When Fatah renounced terrorism, Hamas became the most popular party among the people of Gaza, and they won the 2006 Palestinian elections on a platform of terror and hatred. As Douglas Murray said, it there was a Palestinian state it would be a Nazi state.
NelsonRushton
5mo ago
If I understand the analogy correctly this is an important question. I think part of the answer is that it's a tragedy if the commons. You pay a personal cost for combating wokeness, but your individual vote, campaigning, etc. is unlikely to have a discernable effect: if policy is going to change it is going to be the work of thousands or millions of people a d will happen with or without your effort. Even taking the time and effort to show up at the voting booth on election day incurs a personal cost with no personal gain.
The same thing is true of as a soldier in battle, of sticking your head up over the sandbags to fire a shot at the enemy. The war will be won or lost no matter what you do, but you risk getting shot when you engage with the enemy. Your motive is one of principle one, while the risk is a material one. When enough people withdraw from honor and principle and cling to the material, nothing else can happen but what we are seeing.
NelsonRushton
6mo ago
What's interesting about Lenin's writings is that he's usually pretty forthright about what he wanted and planned.
Yet so many people thought, "It's just a figure of speech; he doesn't really mean...". Kind of like Hamas.
Lenin was not exactly secretive, but from my reading his tone did become more militant as time went on, at least up until 1917 -- and, secretive or not, the carnage caught many people by surprise. It reminds me of the woke meme, what did you think decolonization meant?.
Grandmother, What big teeth you have!
Part 2: Censorship in the Soviet Union
(Note: This continues an earlier post on how Russian intellectuals failed to foresee the brutality of the Soviet communist regime, and discussing certain hallmarks that tyrannical ideologies tend to display, even in their early stages.)
Plato wrote 2500 years ago that when a society ceases to honor virtue, that society is ripe for descent into tyranny. The emerging tyrannical ideology, he wrote, will be advanced by a coalition of drones -- those who do no useful work -- consisting of three separate factions: bureaucrats, criminals, and those who live on handouts [The Republic, VIII]. As they gather power on the road to tyrannical rule, one of the first things the drones begin to do, according to Plato, is to try and silence the speech of their political opponents:
While the keener sort [of drones] speak and act, the rest keep buzzing about the bema [public speech platform] and do not suffer a word to be said on the other side [The Republic, VIII].
Plato’s observation has proven to be prescient: tyrannical regimes have often attempted to silence their political opponents through intimidation and harassment, even before they gained the political power enact legal censorship. The Nazis, for example, while they may have been on the other side of the political spectrum from Plato's archetypal tyrant, began employing such tactics long before they officially came to power in 1933. Indeed, before Nazis were even a viable political force at all, Nazi paramilitary thugs -- "Brownshirts" or "Stormtroopers" -- began harassing attendees and speakers at political gatherings opposed to Naziism.
To be fair, Marxist agitators tried to harass Nazis at their political events as well, and one of the functions of the Brownshirts was to prevent that; and if that was all the Brownshirts had done, they would not have foreshadowed the monstrous tyranny that German Naziism was to become. If you had lived in Germany in 1925 and had been wondering what the Nazis might do if they came to power, one clue would have been their attempts to suppress opposing political speech. Another would be their militant identity politics: advocating discrimination and collective punishment against an alleged historical exploiter class (viz., the Jews). Soviet communism, like Naziism, bore these hallmarks of tyranny early in its emergence, long before the Bolsheviks formed their dictatorial regime. In a previous post I discussed the role of identity politics in the early rise of Soviet communism. This article will discuss the phenomenon of Soviet censorship, which emerged early on in subtle forms, and then unfolded with ever-growing virulence as the ideology rose to power — and which bears a striking resemblance to the cancel culture and censoriousness of today’s woke ideology.
Censorship in the Early Bolshevik Movement
Before October of 1917, the Bolshevik party in Russia was not in a position to censor anything. Indeed, before 1905 the Bolshevik party was not in a position of sufficient power to realistically dream of censoring anything. Yet, even at that time, while giving some lip service to freedom of the press (which he would later revoke), Lenin was advocating strict, top-down orthodoxy and cancel culture within his sphere of control, which at that time consisted of the party itself:
Freedom of speech and the press must be complete. But then freedom of association must be complete too. I am bound to accord you, in the name of free speech, the full right to shout, lie and write to your heart’s content. But you are bound to grant me, in the name of freedom of association, the right to enter into, or withdraw from, association with people advocating this or that view. The party is a voluntary association, which would inevitably break up, first ideologically and then physically, if it did not cleanse itself of people advocating anti-party views. [Lenin (1905): "Party Organisation and Party Literature"]
On one hand this passage may seem innocuous: any organization is entitled to reject, or eject, would-be members who are working against the goals of the organization -- and the goal of the Bolshevik party was an ideological one. On the other hand, for example, even if you think of Donald Trump, or, respectively, Joe Biden, as a despot of some kind, I submit that it would be a bit jarring to hear either one of them speak publicly in the language of cleansing their ranks of anti-party views. It is one thing to say that someone is working toward goals that are inconsistent with those of an organization and is therefore unwelcome in it; it is another thing to label this as a cleansing -- as if anyone who departs from the party line is filth.
Moreover, recall that Lenin did not countenance deviation from (his version of) socialist ideology in the slightest degree [Lenin (1902): "What is to be done?"]. Correspondingly, he writes that there should be no independent press within the socialist movement, but that the only socialist literature should be official party literature:
All Social-Democratic literature must become Party literature. Every newspaper, journal, publishing house, etc., must immediately set about reorganizing its work, leading up to a situation in which it will, in one form or another, be integrated into one Party organization or another. [Lenin (1905): "Party Organization and Party Literature"]
We see that the idea of ideological purity -- intolerant of any deviation and enforced from the top down -- was already present in Lenin's public writing in 1905. In this early stage, Lenin was not yet advocating official government censorship [Kenez (1981): "Lenin and the Freedom of the Press"]. However, by 1917, on the eve of the Bolshevik coup d'etat, Lenin reversed the lip service he had previously given to freedom of the press -- on the grounds that government non-interference merely sets the stage for the spread of misinformation:
The capitalists (and many SRs and Mensheviks following them either through misunderstanding or inertia) call freedom of the press that situation in which censorship is abolished and all parties freely publish any paper they please. In reality this is not freedom of the press, but freedom for the rich, for the bourgeoisie to mislead the oppressed and exploited masses. [Lenin (1917): How to Guarantee the Success of the Constituent Assembly]
As soon as the Bolsheviks seized power October 1917, one of their first actions was to systematically confiscate the presses of major opposing newspapers. Within a year, only one point of view was to be seen in the Russian press -- and within a few years practically every newspaper, theater, and publishing house in the former Russian Empire was under strict supervision, if not direct control, of the Soviet government. All to protect the victims of historical class oppression from misinformation by historical class exploiters and their hangers-on. Of course.
The Blooming of Lenin's Tyranny
Before coming to power in 1917, Lenin had lived through Tsarist censorship and wartime censorship in Russia -- both of which had been applied to his own writing -- in addition to a period of relative freedom of the press, which occurred in the roughly ten-year span between the fall of the Tsar and the entry of Russian into World War I. Having tasted from both wells, Lenin's response could have been to dedicate himself to fighting against censorship and authoritarianism of all kinds. It wasn't.
Decades earlier, Karl Marx had written that the working class, when they had grown sick enough of being oppressed by their employers, would spontaneously revolt and seize power, forming a "dictatorship of the proletariat" with no official government. These ideals of spontaneous working-class revolution and stateless society were fundamental to Marxism, and Lenin opposed them so staunchly that he could not rightly be called a Marxist. Hence, we have the term Marxist-Leninist for the political philosophy of Lenin and his followers in the early Soviet Union. In contrast to Marx, Lenin wrote that the working class would never spontaneously revolt against the foundations of capitalism, but instead would merely try to strike a better deal with their employers though collective bargaining and moderate government regulation. He believed, therefore, that the working class would have to be guided from without, so to speak, by forceful intellectual and political leaders:
We have said that there could not have been Social-Democratic consciousness among the workers. It would have to be brought to them from without. The history of all countries shows that the working class, exclusively by its own effort, is able to develop only trade union consciousness, i.e., the conviction that it is necessary to combine in unions, fight the employers, and strive to compel the government to pass necessary labour legislation, etc. The theory of socialism, however, grew out of the philosophic, historical, and economic theories elaborated by educated representatives of the propertied classes, by intellectuals...
To belittle the socialist ideology in any way, to turn aside from it in the slightest degree means to strengthen bourgeois ideology. There is much talk of spontaneity. But the spontaneous development of the working-class movement leads to its subordination to bourgeois ideology, ... Hence, our task, the task of Social-Democracy, is to combat spontaneity, to divert the working-class movement from this spontaneous, trade-unionist striving to come under the wing of the bourgeoisie, and to bring it under the wing of revolutionary Social Democracy. [Lenin (1902): What is to be done?]
Reading Lenin's words in 1902, one might have wondered how, exactly, the working class was to be "brought under the wing of the socialist party", and induced not to "turn aside from it [Marxist-Leninist ideology] in the slightest degree". Could Lenin have meant that the people just need a good talking to, in order to achieve and maintain ideological purity? In hindsight we know that is not what he meant by any means, but we also know that many people -- even within the party and sympathetic to it -- were blindsided by murderous brutality of the regime that would emerge from the Bolshevik Revolution. I submit that the signs they missed included Lenin's contemptuous intellectual elitism, his sense of being entitled to be agreed with and obeyed (under the wing), and his militant intolerance of opposing ideas even before he had the power to legally censor them. Sound familiar?
Ideologically speaking, Lenin pivoted away from Marx's notion of a "dictatorship of the proletariat", and towards a dictatorship on behalf of the proletariat, but directed by the communist government, led by himself. In case one wondered what Lenin meant by dictatorship, he would soon make that quite clear: "dictatorship means unlimited power based on force" [Lenin (1906): The Victory of the Cadets]. In theory, practically unlimited power might be used exclusively for kind and helpful purposes: to fight injustice, and rescue the oppressed from their oppressors, like Superman and the Fantastic Four. That is the way Lenin talked about using his power before he got it, but people who strive for power sometimes do not to use it the way they say they are going to. Those who champion a narrative of militant identity politics -- that is, collective punishment of historical class oppressors -- are particularly likely to bloom into tyrants as they gather power. If, in addition, they have a strong impulse to control what other people are allowed to say and write, then it is practically a theorem that they will abuse whatever political power they eventually get their hands on.
NelsonRushton
6mo ago
Tell me what you really, really want to happen if you "win"? Most leftists won't come out and say "I want Israel to be destroyed." Some of them will give some sort of pie-in-the-sky one state answer, like above. But the reality is that the literal destruction of Israel is the only real "win condition" for them.
Hear, hear!
I also feel that if a return to a sufficient level of realpolitik and putting Western interests first is ever going to be pulled into the Overton window at this point
What we have seen up to this point in the spread of wokeness (including anti-West, victim-class politics) is unfathomable craziness and stupidity, but not material threats to the safety and comfort of the upper middle class and the wealthy. I would guess that those threats are coming soon (within a generation, or two at the most), and I think that could change the Overton window dramatically. If you've read the Old Testament, it is a familiar pattern (substituting "wokeness" in current events for "idolatry" in the Hebrew Bible).
I am not particularly optimistic (as, say, Vivek Ramaswamy is) about what will come next after that; it might be right wing tyranny. (If you had visited Germany in the early 1920's you might have thought, "What a zoo! Look at all these Marxists rioting in the streets, and all this open sexual deviance!). But I do agree with Ramaswamy that wokeness is likely to eat itself as its material consequences begin to be felt by the new oligarchs.
This is such an extreme claim about Hamas that I would want to see evidence from it,
This claim of fact isn't central to my point and if you don't accept it I withdraw it. The point is this:
If you wanted to (validly) argue that the Palestinian response is moral, you would have to either (1) assert that the Palestinians have gotten shafted worse than any other group in history ever has, or (2) point to historical examples of morally justified campaigns of homicide against civilians, morally comparable to that of Hamas in terms of their justification and methods (e.g., in their use of human shields, the degree to which they preferentially target civilians, and their stated objective of genocide). I would be wary of applying an abstract moral principle to a controversial case, if there is not a single factually comparable case to which it can also be applied.
So do you want to (validly) argue that the Palestinian response is moral? If so do you accept that you would have to agree to either (1) or (2), and if so, which do you agree to?
If you claim, for example, that (A) the IRA is generally justified in how it prosecutes its campaign and (B) the IRA's methods and objectives are morally comparable to those of Hamas, then we have something to talk about. But if there is no such claim you would make about any organization in history other than Hamas, then that would be notable.
After researching your sources, I found enough evidence to withdraw the example from the post -- though implicitly I was referring to the Roman occupation in the Second Temple Period rather than the Kitos War.
It would be nice if you cited your sources more precisely, by author name, date, and document name, preferably with a link. I notice you did not name the document by Cassius Dio, or quote it, which is peculiar because it is pretty juicy in support of your point:
Meanwhile the Jews in the region of Cyrene had put one Andreas at their head and were destroying both the Romans and the Greeks. They would cook their flesh, make belts for themselves of their entrails, anoint themselves with their blood, and wear their skins for clothing. Others they would give to wild beasts and force still others to fight as gladiators [Cassius Dio (c .30BC): Dio's Roman History, Chapter 70 passage 32]
I think the current consensus (right or wrong) is that that quote makes Dio less credible, and in any case that is also my opinion. I don't find the other sources credible in their details either -- but I agree they are enough to show by a preponderance of the evidence that the Jewish rebellion in the Kitos War was tactically targeting Greek and Roman civilians.
NelsonRushton
6mo ago
(A) IRA terrorism is or was morally justified... Yes, in my opinion. (Also the ETA and a lot of other examples like that
This is only half of the argument, my friend. The reason (A) was given a label is because it was conjoined with (B): the IRA's tactics and objectives are morally comparable to those of Hamas. That would entail that the IRA maximizes civilian casualties on their own side tactically, targets primarily civilians on the other side, and has the death of all Englishmen as a persistent and publicly stated objective. I assume you don't assert those things but I could be mistaken.
NelsonRushton
6mo ago
Let's start with number three, because that is the one that surprises me. (1) The city government of NYC is woke AF, (2) so is the administration of Columbia U, and (3) one element of the woke agenda is a strong leaning toward both Palestine and BLM to the point of permitting illegal protests for both. Do you affirm or deny (1), (2), and (3)?
NelsonRushton
6mo ago
I read your post and you mentioned "vile and ineffectual resistance" but I don't see where you mentioned genocide as a strategic objective. That is to say Hamas and a critical mass of the Palestinian citizens want all of the Jews dead as an ultimate objective, whether they have a state or not. You assent to that as a matter of fact and think it is a morally defensible position?
I don't claim that most progressives want to defund the police. I do claim that if progressives, as a group, really cared about the safety of black people, then they would be talking about the dramatic increase in murder rates since 2014 (at least as much, for example, as they talk about alleged racism in policing) -- and they would be the ones asking the question of whether the Ferguson effect had a role in it.
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