Posted on 03/12/2021 4:25:58 PM PST by MtnClimber
For a revolutionary, the world is worthless and merits annihilation. Someone who thinks so must loathe life. “There is no greater joy, there is no better music than a crushing sound of smashed bones and lives,” a Bolshevik poet echoed in a hymn to obliteration. The Nazis “were destroyers,” argued psychologist Erich Fromm. “They hated not only their enemies, they hated life itself.” A zeal for annihilation is at the core of extremism, no matter what the orientation. Remarkably, emotional rejection of the world almost always precedes the destroyers’ ideological justification of a plan for its ruin.
Nihilists at the turn of the 20th century in Russia held sanity, love, and kindness to be archaic and banal. Conversely, destructiveness was a token of urbanity. Writer Andrei Bely described his disparaging contemporaries who applauded everything “abnormal,” “odd,” “sick,” and antisocial. Miserable, they saw around them only despair and a profound gloom. The nihilists were desperate for a “higher principle” yet insisted there was none, the inner conflict turning into a source and a trigger for rage, which often took a political form.
Countless radicals failed to articulate concrete grievances or objectives and yearned only “to finish with all the old.” The “banner that united us was the denial of life that had formed us,” Bely explained, referring to the rebels’ self-destructive desire to annihilate the milieu of which they were an integral part.“ Our cause,” declared the 19th-century Russian radical Sergei Nechaev, is “total, universal, and merciless destruction.”
Contrary to a familiar Marxist claim that “being determines consciousness,” successes in mobilization of the hitherto conservative or apolitical masses for political revolt have frequently occurred at times of liberalization and reform. In the past century, extremism thrived in societies where disintegrated ideals left behind a cultural, ethical, and spiritual void—to be filled with totalitarian agendas. Radicalization is a psychological plight, accompanying an abrupt breakdown in collective identities.
Russia in the early 1900s was a perfect case of what the psychologist Robert J. Lifton has called “historical dislocation,” when a sense of a catastrophe accompanied the crumbling of a cultural setting, hitherto defined by the communal way of life.
Leftists seem to thrive on hate and evil. They always seem to achieve the same results...hell on earth.
I just finished reading a book about the Russo-Japanese War in the early 1900s.
The Russian Army and Navy got their clocks cleaned by the Japanese.
Few people realize the effects this had on the Russian people.
The losses were astounding.
A European Army lost to an Asian Army.
It was humiliating.
Then WWI came along and the Russians got beat again.
The author of the book makes the case that the Russians were defeated because they selected their military leaders based on their politics, and not on their war fighting abilities.
Does that sound familiar?
Excellent article. Very well written without the cumbersome verbosity of a Victor D. Hanson piece. thank you for posting.
Good article
Bookmarked
"....Again, radical organizers are there to fill the void with extremist agendas and to provide targets (“white men,” “white supremacy”) for mass animosity. There is, however, a new aspect in the familiar template: In the United States, nihilist intellectuals are not just exploiting the value vacuum created by changes in social structure and the advent of new technologies; the void is in fact their own creation."
It’s going to take a Chosin Reservoir event, or worse, for us to get our heads out of our nether regions.
Ping
At the core of totalitarian thought and behavior is the practice of forfeiting personhood to a consecrated idea. When a society elevates the idea above the sanctity of individual life, citizens suffer abuse, coercion, violence, and pain. Millions die because political idolatry presupposes perpetual human sacrifice.
It is certainly nihilistic to propose that the individual only exists through membership in a collective, today termed an "identity". You hear this a lot in the form "As a ____, I see..." - the notion that one might see something outside that collective identity makes certain people on the left very uncomfortable, because with individual identity comes individual responsibility. Practically all leftwing ideology these days is a desperate attempt to submerge the individual into the group in order to avoid individual responsibility. There is black history, women's math. That someone might perceive either of these through eyes untinctured by some collective identity is actively denied. What is being denied thereby is the existence of an individual soul.
When I read the lead article’s use of the word “destroyers,” I remember the book of Revelation’s use of the term...somewhere. So I looked it up.
It is at the “last trump,” when God takes to himself his great power ... and He “destroys them which destroy the earth,” Rev. 11:17,18.
He is going to destroy the “destroyers,” the anti-God lawless, anarchist, Nihilist, Bolshevik types that have now taken America by the throat, in other words.
Who have gotten us by the throat, only because a once Bible believing mostly Christian America, has let them. An America which once knew these things were prophesied to happen in the Bible, if they “forget God.”
“The wicked shall be turned into hell, and all nations THAT FORGET GOD,” Psalms 9:17.
Which has become decadent and soft, without the will to rise up against the greatest crime in the history of this country (the election).
The destroyers are here now, and will remain so...unless a spiritually aroused America, which “knows God,” rises up against it. Not politically, but spiritually aroused.
America has been the bulwark, the last hold-out against these “destroyers,” will it rise to the occasion?
Bkmk
Do not let a crisis go to waste!
The Bolsheviks knew and used it.
Too bad that this won’t be taught in today’s public schools.
You mean something like 9/11?
It’s going to take a Chosin Reservoir event, or worse, for us to get our heads out of our nether regions.
>What we’ve got now, sure feels like a “Chosin Reservoir event.” Where’s Chesty Puller when you need him?
At Chosin he is reputed to say something to the effect, “Theve (the communists) got us surrounded? then we’ve got the advantage. We can shoot in any direction now to kill the enemy.”
Bttt
“Some Lessons From the Russian Revolution”
Seize the telegraph office first?
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