Posted on 02/29/2020 5:07:47 AM PST by TigerClaws
Last year, I spoke to a Soviet-born scholar who teaches in an American public university. I’m using a quote from our discussion in my forthcoming (September) book, Live Not By Lies. This morning, she sent me this e-mail, which I reproduce here with her permission:
I know from your blog that the work on your new book is going well and I’m glad because, boy, it’s so needed. I’m observing some disturbing developments on my campus, and we are really not one of those wokester schools for spoiled brats one normally associates with this kind of thing.
This academic year I’ve had an opportunity to work with some early-career academics. These are newly-minted PhDs that are in their first year on the tenure-track. What’s really scary is that they sincerely believe all the woke dogma. Older people – those in their forties, fifties or sixties – might parrot the woke mantras because it’s what everybody in academia does and you have to survive. But the younger generation actually believes it all. Transwomen are women, black students fail calculus because there are no calc profs who “look like them,” ‘whiteness’ is the most oppressive thing in the world, the US is the most evil country in history, anybody who votes Republican is a racist, everybody who goes to church is a bigot but the hijab is deeply liberating. I gently mocked some of this stuff (like we normally do among older academics), and two of the younger academics in the group I supervise actually cried. Because they believe all this so deeply, and I’d even say fanatically, that they couldn’t comprehend why I wasn’t taking it seriously.
The fanatical glimmer in their eyes really scared me.
Back in the USSR in the 1970s and the 1980s nobody believed the dogma. People repeated the ideological mantras for cynical reasons, to get advanced in their careers or get food packages. Many did it to protect their kids. But nobody sincerely believed. That is what ultimately saved us. As soon as the regime weakened a bit, it was doomed because there were no sincere believers any more. Everybody who did take the dogma seriously belonged to the generation of my great-grandparents.
In the US, though, the generation of the fanatical believers is only now growing up and coming into its prime. We’ll have to wait until their grandkids grow up to see a generation that will be so fed up with the dogma that it will embrace freedom of thought and expression. But that’s a long way away in the future.
I’m mentoring a group of young scholars in the Humanities to help them do research, and I’m starting to hate this task. Young scholars almost without exception think that scholarship is entirely about repeating woke slogans completely uncritically. Again, this is different from the USSR where scholars peppered their writing with the slogans but always took great pride in trying to sneak in some real thinking and real analysis behind the required ideological drivel. Every Soviet scholar starting from the 1970s was a dissident at heart because everybody knew that the ideology was rotten.
All of this is sad and very scary. I never thought I’d experience anything worse, anything more intellectually stifling than the USSR of its last two decades of existence. But now I do see something worse.
The book you are writing is very important, and I hope that many people hear your message.
Folks, Americans are extremely naive about what’s coming. We just cannot imagine that people who burst into tears in the face of gentle mockery of their political beliefs can ever come to power. They are already in power, in the sense that they have mesmerized leaders of American institutions. I’m telling you, that 2015 showdown on Yale’s campus between Prof. Nicholas Christakis and the shrieking students was profoundly symbolic. Christakis used the techniques of discursive reason to try to establish contact with these young people. None of it mattered. They yelled and cursed and sobbed. The fact that he disagreed with them, they took as an assault on their person.
And Yale University caved to them!
This stuff is so outrageous that we can’t wrap our minds around how these people will ever come to rule us. Listen to what these people who grew up under communism are saying!
Nadine Gordimer said:
“All the young are candidates for the solutions of communism or fascism when there are no alternatives to despair or dissipation.”
The religion of social justice is rushing in to fill the vacuum. Nice liberals, and nice conservatives, cannot allow themselves to think of where this might go. Solzhenitsyn knew better:
If the intellectuals in the plays of Chekhov who spent all their time guessing what would happen in twenty, thirty, or forty years had been told that in forty years interrogation by torture would be practiced in Russia; that prisoners would have their skulls squeezed within iron rings, that a human being would be lowered into an acid bath; that they would be trussed up naked to be bitten by ants and bedbugs; that a ramrod heated over a primus stove would be thrust up their anal canal (the “secret brand”); that a man’s genitals would be slowly crushed beneath the toe of a jackboot; and that, in the luckiest possible circumstances, prisoners would be tortured by being kept from sleeping for a week, by thirst, and by being beaten to a bloody pulp, not one of Chekhov’s plays would have gotten to its end because all the heroes would have gone off to insane asylums.
So did Dr. Silvester Krcmery, a Slovak Catholic lay leader in the underground church, who suffered isolation and torture in a communist prison for his faith and resistance. In the memoir he wrote after communism’s fall, Krcmery warned future generations that the past could be prelude to the future if they were not vigilant:
We are so often naive in our thinking. We live, contented and safe, with the idea that in a civilized country, in the mostly cultured and democratic environment of our times, such a coercive regime is impossible. We forget that in unstable countries, a certain political structure can lead to indoctrination and terror, where individual elements and stages of brainwashing are already implemented. This, at first, is quite inconspicuous. However, often in a very short time, it can develop into a full undemocratic totalitarian system.
Hannah Arendt, in her 1951 study The Origins of Totalitarianism, said these factors in German and Russian society made them susceptible to Nazism and Bolshevism, respectively:
Loneliness Social Atomization Loss of Faith In Hierarchies And Institutions The Desire To Transgress And Destroy Indifference to Truth, and the Willingness To Believe Useful Lies A Mania for Ideology A Society That Values Loyalty More Than Expertise The Politicization of Everything If you think we’re not going on full-tilt on these things, you aren’t paying attention.
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UPDATE: Some people seem to think that the Arendt list is somehow faulting the Left. It’s not, at least not intentionally. She said these factors were present in both Germany, which went to the hard right, and Russia, which went to the hard left. I think these factors are present in our society, period. Some of them are stronger on the Left, it is true, but I think they’re all simply present. Is loneliness a Right or a Left thing? Is social atomization
The article loses me right there.
Hitler, and his regime, were Leftist.
First, fascism was an offshoot of socialism. Mussolini was a loyal member of the Italian socialist party and editor of their newspaper until he left based on foreign policy disagreement - not economic ones.
Second, although the economic right/left axis is important, more important is the authoritarian/freedom axis. In the end the economic justification of a totalitarian state doesn't matter because the government is in charge of everything and the individual citizens are not.
I agree. Antisemites but socialists. More government control = leftist.
This is also excellent.
Decades old a KGB defector describes accurately what the Marxists have done to our country.
“Loneliness Social Atomization Loss of Faith In Hierarchies And Institutions The Desire To Transgress And Destroy Indifference to Truth, and the Willingness To Believe Useful Lies A Mania for Ideology A Society That Values Loyalty More Than Expertise The Politicization of Everything If you think we’re not going on full-tilt on these things, you aren’t paying attention.”
More punctuation and less capitalization, please.
They are the leftist rats on your street, the busy bodies, gossips and snitches. They will potentially report you, swat you, or red flag you.
I know who mine is and is plain as day. Couple neighbors and I have discussed this topic and keep our information and beliefs to ourselves and when other neighbors start repeating this neighbor's busy body gossip, we plainly reply that this person is too much into everyone’s affairs and if they're gossiping about me, or the other neighbors they are doing it about you too, so be careful what you talk about. This has quieted it down a bit.
Hannah Arendt, in her 1951 study The Origins of Totalitarianism, said these factors in German and Russian society made them susceptible to Nazism and Bolshevism, respectively:I think still I have a copy of "The Origins of Totalitarianism" from college, when it was seen as a warning rather than an instruction manual.Loneliness
Social Atomization
Loss of Faith In Hierarchies And Institutions
The Desire To Transgress And Destroy
Indifference to Truth, and the Willingness To Believe Useful Lies
A Mania for Ideology
A Society That Values More Than Expertise
The Politicization of Everything
If you think we’re not going on full-tilt on these things, you aren’t paying attention.
Well, that is easier to read.
Thank you. Posted on a smartphone.
This is worth reading as well:
Three Decades Ago, America Lost Its Religion. Why?
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/09/atheism-fastest-growing-religion-us/598843/
Although belief in God is no panacea for these problems, religion is more than atheism. It is a bundle: a theory of the world, a community, a social identity, a means of finding peace and purpose, and a weekly routine. Those, like me, who have largely rejected this package deal, often find themselves shopping à la carte for meaning, community, and routine to fill a faith-shaped void. Their politics is a religion. Their work is a religion. Their spin class is a church. And not looking at their phone for several consecutive hours is a Sabbath.
The absolute first requirement for woke totalitarianism is government and bureaucratic centralism. Once you have power collected in the center, in the national government, its only a matter of time.
And in America today, nearly all Americans love the power of Fed.gov.
Very good - thanks for posting. We can see exactly what is described and it’s not comfortable. Who promised us comfort? No one. Did we ever expect it to happen to our country? I, for one say NO! A lot of grumblings and “what ifs” went on during the ‘60’s - 70’s and beyond..with relatives, friends and neighbors surely but did we expect it to really happen?
The reason why roads are falling apart is that cities and states can no longer even consider filling a pot hole, much less build a bridge, without applying for a federal grant to do it and appeal any rejection. By then that pothole has turned into a mile of shabby road.
“”And not looking at their phone for several consecutive hours is a Sabbath.””
I thought people shriveled up and faded away if that took place. They don’t?
99% excellent, until the final paragraph. There was nothing "right" about National Socialism.
When the SHTF, do you have a plan to deal with that individual?
Don’t have to go to the movies anymore to see what zombies look & sound like.
“When the SHTF, do you have a plan to deal with that individual?”
We do.
They all start with the letter S.
L
solutions have been discussed
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