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. Im 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 Im glad because, boy, its so needed. Im 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 Ive 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. Whats 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 its 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 Id even say fanatically, that they couldnt comprehend why I wasnt 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. Well 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 thats a long way away in the future.
Im mentoring a group of young scholars in the Humanities to help them do research, and Im 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 Id 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 whats 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. Im telling you, that 2015 showdown on Yales 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 cant 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 mans 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 Chekhovs 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 communisms 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 were not going on full-tilt on these things, you arent paying attention.
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UPDATE: Some people seem to think that the Arendt list is somehow faulting the Left. Its 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 theyre all simply present. Is loneliness a Right or a Left thing? Is social atomization
Keep your powder dry
A good book to read about it is The Ominous Parallels by Leonard Peikoff (if you can ignore the Objectivist pom-pom waving).
Will review. Many thanks.
Well, to be fair, being for less government to the extent of no government at all also = leftist as well. Just ask Noam Chomsky, Michel Foucault, Jean-Paul Sartre, and the like. All three labeled themselves as anarchists, yet are still very much adherents to left-wing ideology. Heck, in Foucault’s case, he was against even Socialist people’s courts, wanting to get rid of courts altogether and have “popular justice” akin to the September Massacres.
“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.”
Not entirely sure about that. Chomsky, Sartre, and Foucault technically were for freedom, ie, no government at all, aka Anarchy, yet they were full-on leftists.
I don't know about the other two, but although Chomsky claims to be a libertarian socialist he always seems to promote a government solution to everything which is neither libertarian nor anarchist. Most of the street "anarchists" I've seen are really very pro-archist but they just want to be the ones in charge after a period of broken windows, burnt buildings and smashed heads. Once they take over they want the full power of the state to crush anyone who might even peacefully protest like the Tea Party rallies. Bernie's vision of democratic socialism does not allow for a democratic capitalism to be voted into power afterward.
Well, for Sartre, you can look up the following links regarding his anarchism:
1. https://web.archive.org/web/20170202203851/http://raforum.info/spip.php?article92
As far as Michel Foucault... he entered a blind debate with Maoists, probably the most extreme form of Marxists, and he basically said that even Socialist People’s Courts were too restricting on popular justice, and envisioned popular justice as not allowing for ANY courts at all, just unrestrained lynchings, as you can read here: https://web.archive.org/web/20141114060055/http://www4.uwm.edu/c21/conferences/2008since1968/foucault_maoists.pdf
And here’s the quote:
“Foucault: In my view one shouldn’t start with the court as a particular form, and then go on to ask how or on what conditions there could be a people’s court; one should start with popular justice, with acts of justice by the people, and go on to ask what place a court would have in this. We must ask whether such acts of popular justice can or cannot be organised in the form of a court. Now my hypothesis is not so much that the court is the natural expression of popular justice, but rather that its historical function is to ensnare it, to control it and to strangle it, by re-inscribing it within institutions which are typical of a state apparatus. For example, in 1792, when war with neighbouring countries broke out and the Parisian workers were called on to go and get themselves killed, they replied: ‘We’re not going to go before we’ve brought our enemies within our own country to court. While we’ll be out there exposed to danger, they’ll be protected by the prisons they’re locked up in. They’re only waiting for us to leave in order to come out and set up the old order of things all over again. In any case, those who are in power today want to use against us—in order to bring us back under control—the dual pressure of enemies invading from abroad and those who threaten us at home. We are not going to fight against the former without having first dealt with the latter.’ The September executions were at one and the same time an act of war against internal enemies, a political act against the manipulations of those in power, and an act of vengeance against the oppressive classes. Was this not—during a period of violent revolutionary struggle—at least an approximation to an act of popular justice; a reaction to oppression, strategically effective and politically necessary? Now, no sooner had the executions started in September, when men from the Paris Commune—or from that quarter—intervened and set about staging a court: judges behind a table, representing a third party standing between the people ‘screaming for vengeance’, and the accused who were either ‘guilty’ or ‘innocent’; an investigation to establish the ‘truth’ or to obtain a ‘confession’; deliberation to find out what was ‘just’; this form was imposed in an authoritarian manner. Can we not see the embryonic, albeit fragile form of a state apparatus reappearing here? The possibility of class oppression? Is not the setting up of a neutral institution standing between the people and its enemies, capable of establishing the dividing line between the true and false, the guilty and innocent, the just and the unjust, is this not a way of resisting popular justice? A way of disarming it in the struggle it is conducting in reality in favour of an arbitration in the realm of the ideal? This is why I am wondering whether the court is not a form of popular justice but rather its first deformation.”
You can also look at Sacco and Vanzetti, who were explicitly anarchists and killed people in the name of anarchism, and even Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, who practically founded anarchism, demanded for destruction of capitalism. Heck, even Karl Marx stated the endgoal of Communism besides creating a classless society also entailed a stateless society, and specifically had in mind Robespierre’s Reign of Terror as an inspiration.
That’s why I disagree with the notion that anarchism is of the right wing or conservativism, being as much of a misnomer as Nazism/Fascism being right-wing.
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