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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 2, 2024

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The universal method to explain complex ideas in intuitive ways that can be understood and internalized by everyone is art. You need to explore honestly the communist idea, dance with it in some form and reap all the lessons from it.

There's no shortage of such art, including by communists. Art that shows how stupid, arbitrary, petty, envious, it can all be. All the vices it encourages in men.

But the inherent danger is of course that any honest wrestling with the idea has to acknowledge the virtues of it as well. Communism like all modernisms is in fact admirable at least in that it has a project for mankind, a positive vision of the future, a greatness promised in earnest that one can work towards with reason and science.

The attraction to that, or other failed modernisms is not just a whim. And you have to recognize that the vices and virtues that lead people to consider communism are not going away. They are real parts of the human experience that will stay with us forever along with justice, racism, genocide, liberty, greed, sacrifice and everything else.

We should still explore of course. I think one of the greatest pieces of anti communist art was actually produced recently in the Chernobyl HBO series, and though the author probably wished it as anti populist it shines a light on the core problem that toppled the Soviet Union from the top. Its relationship to truth.

You want to make normies understand the flaws of communism? Fund an anime adaptation of Atlas Shrugged, video games about trying to solve the ECP, songs about the pettiness of the bureaucrat, and all other such things.

I agree with much of this take. Two of the greatest anti-communist works ever written, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, were written by a socialist. I know that Nineteen Eighty-Four is more broadly a critique of all totalitarianism, and that it was in part inspired by Orwell's experiences with English bureaucracy, but it also was clearly inspired by his experiences of being a socialist who came to realize that Stalinism was brutal and murderous.

And there have been many good anti-communist works produced by ex-socialists and ex-communists. David Horowitz's stuff is one example. He was a dyed-in-the-wool communist who ended up leaving communism once he realized that the radical leftist movements he was involved in both cared more about the success of "the cause" than about truth and reality and that some of them, like the Black Panther Party, had literal murderers involved in running things on a high level.