Posted on 10/22/2019 6:36:25 AM PDT by C19fan
I’m reading one of the best books I’ve ever seen, historian Yuri Slezkine’s The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution. It’s a massive — over 1,000 pages — history of the Bolshevik movement, focusing on the people who lived in a vast apartment building constructed across the Moskva River from the Kremlin, for party elites. In the 1930s, during the purges, it was the most dangerous address in the country. The secret police came for people there all the time.
The book has given me a breakthrough in understanding why so many people who grew up under communism are unnerved by what’s going on in the West today, even if they can’t all articulate it beyond expressing intense but inchoate anxiety about political correctness. Reading Slezkine, a UC-Berkeley historian, clarifies things immensely. Let me explain as concisely as I can. All of this is going into the book I’m working on, by the way.
(Excerpt) Read more at theamericanconservative.com ...
History repeats. Some of the biggest supporters and financial backers of the Bolsheviks were the nouveau riche agnostic middle and upper middle classes in Russia. They of course made their money practicing capitalism. After the revolution they were ruthlessly killed or forced to flee Russia by the now in power ruthless Bolsheviks.
“To become more free we must give more of our power to the government.”
AOC
Did AOC really say THAT?
Basically yes. Try to find a clip of her speech at the Bernie Sanders rally. A clear on Bolshevik.
Wonderful, thought-provoking analysis by Dreher, and the book certainly sounds worth reading.
I have been listening to a really fine if somewhat terrifying book, Memoria del Comunismo, by the Spanish writer and journalist Federico Jimenez Losantos. It is truly excellent as it traces the rise of Communism in general, its effects in Russia and Spain, the Communism that unmasked itself during the Spanish Civil War (remember the “Republicans” that idiot American leftists were rushing off to support in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade?), and the current presence and expansion of Communism in Europe and the Americas. It always starts as a sort of SJW movement, which rápida la converts itself into a fanatical, savage, hate-filled cult of resentment (for no good reason), fulfillment through violence and survival through repression.
There’s a particularly devastating chapter on Che Guevara, whose face you see on many an Antifa t-shirt.
I think it’s only available in Spanish, unfortunately, but if you read Spanish you can get it in Kindle format or if you understand Spanish, you can get it from Audible and listen to it.
This article is important - and long. It links to another article https://areomagazine.com/2018/12/18/postmodern-religion-and-the-faith-of-social-justice/ that is even more important - and even longer.
We should violate FR tradition and read the full article, both articles. Globalism is one facet of the SJW phenomenon. These discussions could help us to place the insanity of our globalist enemies in a context that will help us to understand them . . . and to defeat them. The alternative to victory is unimaginably terrible.
Surely, he meant Oliver Cromwell?
“I have just now arrived at the point in Slezkine’s narrative in which he describes the “Great Disappointment” — a term (borrowed from the Millerites) for the experience of the New Jerusalem not having arrived as promised. As I understand it, Slezkine will describe the homicidal spasms of the 1930s, under Stalin, as the vengeful Bolshevik reaction to utopia’s failure.”
And with this we can understand the shockingly high suicide rate of transgender SJW’s. When they come to realize they have been rebelling against their own biology and hundreds of years of social evolution and they have become clownish freaks and everything they have be taught is reveled to be a lie...
I know she thinks it... and everything she says and does is consistent with her believing it... but actually saying it is something else.
I had thought to this point that the SJW movement is one aspect of globalism. But this article suggests that the converse is true, that globalism is just the bourgeois “ally” extension of the social justice left.
Epic fail on that score.
That is why this article is so important. Most sane people merely dismiss SJW, globalism, identity politics, and the rest of the left's nonsense because it is insane. The craziness of the thugs in power and of their ideas did not help the victims of the French Revolution, of Cromwell, or of the Russian Revolution, and we should keep that in mind as we again face the same totalitarian threat. The left's insanity offers no protection to us today. We have to beat them with clear reason, with better appeals to emotion, and with salesmanship (President Trump's strength) until this nonsense fades away.
Rules for Radicals: "Ridicule is man's most potent weapon." Among other things, we have to openly mock the Antifa terrorists. We have to openly mock identity politics and the idea that we should be racist to fight racism. We have to openly mock gender "transitions" (compare a little boy pretending that he is transitioning to a girl with a little boy thinking he's transitioning to be a puppy or a dump truck). We need to make the SJW thugs embarrassed to admit that they are SJW thugs.
Rules for Radicals: "A good tactic is one your people enjoy." We have to make sure that we have fun speaking up for President Trump, for individual freedom (the only freedom that is real), and for those candidates who will support President Trump from 2020 through 2024.
We need to use every aspect of "Rules for Radicals" that we can. We also need to remember that this is destined to be a long war and not just the approaching 2020 battle. We cannot afford even one more defeat for freedom like the losses in 2008 and in 2012. Perhaps the answer is to hijack the democrat party in 2024, just like President Trump hijacked the increasingly globalist insider GOP in 2016.
A slightly different kind of Bobo from you, Mr. Dreher.
They came here for freedom and the progressives are trying to make America just like the countries they escaped.
find the clip if you can.
bmp
Great article. Thanks for posting.
If there ever were a point where it wasn't obvious, we've long passed it - yes, the Social Justice ideology is a religion and its adherents display all the fervor and rigidity of dedicated cultists. The bleating we often hear about "core values" is a case in point - what happens when they conflict, freedom and equality, for example? Silence, then a grudging, "well, in the world to come they won't conflict," which really means "I don't know." Because, as the author states, it isn't about what they're for, it's what they're against that informs them.
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