NelsonRushton
Doctorate in mathematics from the University of Georgia, specializing in probability theory. Masters in AI from the University of Georgia. 15 years as a computer science professor at Texas Tech. Now I work as a logician for an AI startup. Married with one son. He's an awesome little dude.
I identify as an Evangelical Christian, but many Evangelicals would say that I am a deist mystic, and that I am going to Hell. Spiritually, the difference between me and Jordan Peterson is that I believe in miracles. The difference between me and Thomas Paine (an actual deist mystic) is that I believe the Bible is a message to us from the Holy Spirit -- and the difference between me and Billy Graham is that I think there is noise in the signal.
User ID: 2940
Nice thesis statement.
What I would be interested to see is evidence in the sacred texts of other religions, or in the histories of other tribes, of humble laments of the sort found in Isaiah, Ezekiel, and Jeremiah -- in contrast with the "them's the breaks" tone of the pagan texts, or the "we got stabbed in the back by vermin within and without" tone of Mein Kampf. Of course I haven't read every mythological treatise of every world religion, so maybe you can teach me something.
Grandmother, what big teeth you have!
Part 3: Class oppression, everywhere, all the time
(Note: This is the third in a series of posts about parallels between Soviet communism and Western wokeism. The first two installments, on the issues of identity politics and censorship respectively, can be found here and here).
In 1902, Vladimir Lenin wrote,
The Social-Democrat's ideal should not be the trade union secretary, but the tribune of the people, who is able to react to every manifestation of tyranny and oppression, no matter where it appears, no matter what stratum or class of the people it affects; who is able to generalize all these manifestations and produce a single picture of police violence and capitalist exploitation; who is able to take advantage of every event, however small, in order to set forth before all his socialist convictions and his democratic demands, in order to clarify for all and everyone the world-historic significance of the struggle for the emancipation of the proletariat. [Lenin (1902): "What is to be done?"]
This passage invokes two themes that would become part of the fabric of Soviet totalitarianism. First, Lenin presents us with an all-encompassing bogeyman -- described here as capitalist exploitation but usually referred to as bourgeois ideology -- that is associated with a particular class of people, who are held collectively responsible for every injustice that exists in the world. Second, the infernal influence of this class enemy is to be looked for and found in every event, no matter how small. Thus, Lenin urges his followers to see the specter of bourgeois oppression, not just events that would normally be seen as tyrannical and oppressive, but also in things that would, to the untrained eye, be seen as innocent and ordinary.
This article will discuss how these themes played out in Soviet communism, and, in parallel, how they are present in the modern "woke" cancel culture. The motivating impulse of both worldviews can be summarized as follows: every problem is class oppression, and everything is a problem, even if it was never a problem before. For Soviet communism, the invisible, omnipresent oppressor was bourgeois ideology, while for the woke it is white supremacy.
Every problem is class oppression
In Spring of 2015, journalist Rod Dreher received a call from a distraught stranger. The caller said that his mother, an elderly immigrant from Czechoslovakia, was warning him more and more urgently that current events in the United States reminded her of the emergence of communism in her home country in the 1940's. Dreher had good reason to be skeptical; if the world had really been going to Hell for as long as old people have been saying the world is going to Hell, we'd have been there by now. Yet, there was something about the caller's tone that stuck in his mind and made him keep asking himself, What if the old Czech woman sees something the rest of us do not? [Dreher (2020): Live Not By Lies. p. xi]. So Dreher decided to follow up. He found out and interviewed several American immigrants who had formerly lived behind the "iron curtain" of Eastern Bloc communism, and asked them if they felt that the United States was moving toward the sort of totalitarianism that they had experienced in their home countries. According to Dreher, every one of them said yes [ibid, p. xi].
Among the Eastern Bloc immigrants that Dreher interviewed, one parallel they noted was radical identity politics: an agenda of collective punishment for an alleged exploiter class, who was held to blame for everything wrong with the world. For example, in the Soviet Union, frequent shortages of food, cloth, and other goods -- which largely resulted from government planning of the economy -- were routinely blamed on bourgeois saboteurs (vrediteli) by the government-run media. In particular, the first three decades of communist rule saw three major famines in the Soviet Union, beginning respectively in 1921, 1932, and 1946. In reality these resulted largely from government mismanagement, and the 1932 famine was engineered by the Soviet government as part of a terror campaign against Ukrainian farmers -- but all three famines were blamed by the government-run media on bourgeois sabotage (vreditel'stvo). The heavy Russian losses in the Russo-Japanese war and World War I were also blamed, not just on the Tsar, but on every member of Soviet society who had formerly owned property -- another manifestation of bourgeois oppression. The outbreak of typhus in the early 1920's was also blamed by the Soviets on (you guessed it!) bourgeois oppression.
The suffering of working-class Russians leading up to the revolution was very real, very severe, and very unjust from a modern perspective. In fact, as recently as 1860 — less than sixty years before the Bolshevik revolution — about 3 in 10 Russians had lived under by serfdom, which was significantly more oppressive than European serfdom and legally comparable to slavery. The hard question was how to move forward. The answer Lenin offered was indiscriminate collective vengeance, enforced by government despotism, financed by plunder, and motivated by group hatred -- and the first step in the plan of collective vengeance and plundering was to blame the historical exploiter class for everything.
The situation in America is in some ways analogous to that in Russia a hundred years ago. Anti-black racism and slavery are moral stains on our American heritage. Moreover, serious de jure discrimination against blacks in America falls within living memory; less than 70 years have passed since Rosa Parks’s famous refusal to move to the back of the bus in Montgomery, Alabama. Pockets of de facto discrimination remain with us, and the legacy of past discrimination is broad and deep. Just as it was in Russia a hundred years ago, the hard question is how to move forward. The woke answer is Lenin’s answer. Substitute "white supremacy" for "bourgeois oppression" and you have the motivating spirit of the woke mindset -- and, once again, the first step in the plan of collective vengeance and plundering is to blame the historical exploiter class for everything.
White supremacy sometimes goes by the seemingly less inflammatory name of "racism" -- but in the woke view, only white people can be racist; so the two are interchangeable from the woke perspective. On the woke view, blacks suffer from high blood pressure and influenza because of white supremacy. White supremacy is also at work in the deleterious effects of climate change. High crime rates in black neighborhoods are caused by white supremacy, and when a black suspect dies in the custody of five black police officers, that's white supremacy, too. The January 6 attack on the Capital Building was fueled by white supremacy, even for members of the mob who were black or Hispanic. Twenty years ago, the existence of a black white-supremacist was a motif for a comedy sketch; today it's an axiom of woke ideology.
And everything is a problem
There didn't have to be a war, or a famine, or a disease -- or even anything palpably wrong -- in order for Soviet communists to heap blame on the bourgeoisie. Lenin urged his followers to look for the tentacles of bourgeois oppression in every event, no matter how small, and they generally obliged. By and by, the Soviet communists would classify anything that offended their sensibilities in the least -- from Christianity to quantum mechanics to kitchens (sic.) -- as incarnations of bourgeois oppression. That's right: kitchens were considered by the soviets to be bourgeois -- because they were emblems of the historical relegation of women to the role of housework (the Soviets planned for everyone to eat in public cafeterias, though the plan was never implemented).
Imagine a person who has been indoctrinated to see capitalist exploitation and police violence in every event, no matter how small -- from a grand catastrophe to a kitchen. If you find that difficult to imagine, it might help to visit a college campus in today's America. The woke concept of "microaggressions" is the new fashion on American campuses -- and if that fashion does not trace its roots directly to the Leninist playbook, it is at least the work of the same demons. For example, official guidelines at UCLA give the following examples of racist microaggressions:
- asking "Where are you from?"
- saying, “There is only one race: the human race.”
- saying, "I believe the most qualified person should get the job.”
- saying that affirmative action is racist
- saying, “Of course he’ll get tenure, even though he hasn’t published much—he’s Black!”
Microaggression example #5 above is a caricatured way of saying that black faculty members receive favorable race-based treatment in hiring and promotion. During my 20 or so years in academia in Texas, I saw this done openly and universally, even though it was technically against state law. At UCLA, it is not only openly done, but evidently required -- since microaggressions #3 and #4 say it would be racist to oppose the policy. On the other hand, example #5 says that it is also a racist microaggression to say that blacks and other minorities receive preferential treatment. This means that at UCLA -- the flagship public university of the largest state in the US -- the only way to avoid being labeled as a racist is to (1) support the policy of racial preferences in hiring and promotion, and, (2) while advocating that policy, deny that it exists. UCLA is not an outlier in this; similar lists (or the very same one) are officially circulated at many if not most major US institutions of higher learning -- including, for example, Harvard, UNC-Chapel Hill, and my undergraduate alma mater Auburn University. Is that crazier than asserting that quantum mechanics and kitchens are manifestations of bourgeois oppression? Hard to say.
... Even if it was never a problem before
Another theme Dreher heard repeatedly from those who had lived under communism was the ever-changing, ever-expanding reach of what is seen as class-enemy oppression. What counted as acceptable speech, vocabulary and behavior changed so quickly and dramatically that one never knew when "Those in power will come after you as a villain for having said or done something that was perfectly fine the day before" [ibid, p. xii].
In the Soviet Union, what counted as loyal party obedience one day might be considered bourgeois subversion the next. Leon Trotsky, who led the 1905 revolution along with Lenin, was himself assassinated by the Soviet regime in 1940. It is not that Trotsky had changed his views; on the contrary, Trotsky's counterrevolutionary subversion consisted of not changing his views fast enough to keep up with the party line. Several other major central figures of the Bolshevik revolution -- including Pyotr Voykov, Filipp Goloshchyokin Alexander Beloborodov, and Boris Didkovsky -- all met similar fates, along with many minor figures, as well as countless ordinary people, all caught in the gears of evolving standards of party loyalty.
Woke cancel culture, while not nearly as deadly as its Soviet predecessor, operates with similarly shifting standards. For example, in 2008, tech entrepreneur Brendan Eich donated $1000 to support California Proposition 8 -- a ballot initiative designed to keep marriage in California only between opposite-sex couples. For context, gay marriage was not yet legal in California at the time, so Eich's view was arguably mainstream. Eich's view had certainly been mainstream four years earlier, when Barack Obama said, in an interview on Chicago public television, that "Marriage is between a man and a woman". Both Obama and Joe Biden were publicly opposed to gay marriage until 2012, and Hillary Clinton was opposed to gay marriage until 2013. Yet in 2013, just as leading Democrats were publicly evolving to a more liberal position on the issue, Brendan Eich was forced to resign from the board of the Mozilla corporation as a result of the sudden outrage against him for supporting the California ballot proposition five years earlier. Gotta’ keep up, Brendan!
So publicly opposing gay marriage suddenly became politically incorrect — very politically incorrect, to the point where it warrants pressuring someone to resign from their position on a company board — within 12 months after the most prominent progressive leaders first began to publicly support gay marriage. In 2014, saying that all lives matter — a phrase that would have once sounded progressive, and still did as far as she knew — Smith College President Kathleen McCartney felt the need to publicly apologize for having used the phrase in an email (gotta’ keep up, Kathleen!). When NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick first refused to stand for the American National Anthem, it was a bold move for which he received considerable pushback; but in 2020, when fellow quarterback Drew Brees criticized the idea of kneeling for the anthem, not only did he feel the need to issue a groveling apology to assuage the woke mob, but his wife Brittany did too, writing,
We are the problem…To say ‘I don’t agree with disrespecting the flag,’ I now understand was also saying I don’t understand what the problem really is, I don’t understand what you’re fighting for, and I’m not willing to hear you because of our preconceived notions of what that flag means to us.
Gotta’ keep up, Brittany!
Some authors have suggested that cancel culture -- collective punishment of an alleged class oppressor, over seemingly insignificant things, with rapidly shifting standards -- began in the 1990's. The fact is that it is not new, but, as is sometimes said of a pre-owned vehicle, it is just new to us. On the other hand, the Eastern Bloc expatriates that Dreher interviewed found it eerily familiar. I suppose they were acquainted with the previous owners.
It’s been postulated by many that there is a vibe shift in progress against woke ideology... Firstly, do you agree with the claim?
My lived experience is also that there is more pushback against woken insanity than there used to be (say, one or two years ago), and people are less afraid of being cancelled. I don't have a strong theory of why it is happening -- but if you are taking a poll, my vote is that it is happening.
In the Milgram experiment, one of the variants Milgram ran was to let the subject see two other people say 'no' before he began his own session. If that is done, Milgram observed that the percentage of people who administer all shocks drops from 65% to 10% (see the discussion of Experiment 17 here). If I had to guess the cause of the pushback, I would guess that a few visible people who are not professional talking heads standing up -- like Riley Gaines and Elon Musk, and Donald Trump for that matter -- have played the role of the "first person to say no", who gives other people the courage to also stand up and say 'no'.
On the whole, though, I am not optimistic about this being the beginning of a return to sanity. It could be more of a dead cat bounce. We are well down the road that C.S. Lewis called the "Abolition of Man"". Incidentally, I believe that Enlightenment epistemology -- which is the aspirational epistemology of The Motte -- is the root of the problem.
Note: The original version of this post theorized that there was a causal connection from the botched Secret Service protection of Trump to Microsoft's layoff of its DEI team. However, @The_Nybbler then pointed out that the firing happened before the assassination attempt (see below). The post is now about why I think that the diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) push within the Secret Service was responsible for their poor performance on July 13.
When I was a university faculty member, I noticed pretty quickly that no matter what issue was being debated in a faculty meeting, it was always the same people in two camps opposing each other. I am reminded of Thomas Sowell's well-put description:
One of the curious things about political opinions is how often the same people line up on opposite sides of different issues. The issues themselves may have no intrinsic connection with each other. They may range from military spending to drug laws to monetary policy to education, Yet the same familiar faces can be found glaring at each other from opposite sides of the political fence, again and again. [Sowell (1987): A Conflict of Visions, p. 13]
In the case of disputes among college faculty, it took me a while to figure out the underlying variable that basically split the department into two camps -- but once I noticed it, it was consistent and the data grew over time: the basic ideological split in the department was between people who want a culture of meritocracy, and people who don't. So I learned that not everyone wants meritocracy; some people in fact are strongly opposed to it, and that this variable is a major ideological axis in the culture of a university department, and probably of any organization. The degree of meritocracy in an organization correlates with a large number of other variables and determines which direction it goes on a variety of high stakes decisions.
DEI is an assault on meritocracy in a deceptively direct and damaging way, and so it fundamentally changes the organizations it infects. The result of DEI is not just that you hire and promote the best candidates you can under the constraint of identity-group quotas -- because under a DEI push you can't even have an honest discussion about it in case there are better white male candidates. Fundamentally, DEI isn't about quotas; it is about denying facts about group differences, and corresponding individual differences, that underlie the need for quotas. In this way, DEI requires systematically lying about merits of people's credentials and performance, which entails the erosion of the fundamental variable of meritocracy in the organization. This sends the organization into a sick corner of ideological space that results in a pathological inability to perform its mission -- unless its mission is licking the boots of DEI-loving bureaucrats and politicians, which is, without exaggeration, the primary, or at least a primary, mission of a growing number of organizations.
And that, I think, is how an amateur would-be assassin was able to stalk unopposed onto on a rooftop, with a rifle, 130 yards (short rifle range) from a podium where the former president and presumptive Republican presidential nominee was speaking, with a clear line of site to the podium (every time I re-read that sentence, I think I am in the Twilight Zone). The more information comes out about this event, the more it seems to be a result of institutional incompetence on the part of the Secret Service, and the more egregious the stonewalling is from that agency, and the more baffling the whole situation is -- unless you understand DEI and its consequences.
NelsonRushton
4mo ago
Sorry, I don't accept "agree to disagree"
lol. What does you not accepting it look like? Whatever it is, knock yourself out.
NelsonRushton
5mo ago
In his book "Conflict of Visions", Thomas Sowell slams Plato as an adherent of the "unconstrained vision", and a proto-Marxist. However, it is not clear that Plato actually advocates the policies he describes as "ideal state" to be a thing in the real world.
In any case, while the Greeks described certain problems very cogently, I wouldn't turn to them for wholesale solutions. They obviously never figured out how to run a sustained democracy. The Romans did, though -- from around 500 BC to 150 BC. Unfortunately, the Romans didn't write much in that period, and we do not even have a full text of their constitution, the "Twelve Tables of Roman Law" (I'm not even sure they kept a written copy). Maybe that's the secret -- don't write it down!
NelsonRushton
4mo ago
I read Ch 10 of How to be an Antiracist and did not find what I expected, from this post, to find there. I don't see him walk back the contents of his 2003 Famua article; he says you shouldn't hate white people for being white, but he was already expressing that position in 2003. Can you quote him on retracting and/or apologizing for the 2003 article I quoted?
NelsonRushton
5mo ago
I started graduate school in 1990, and I got a glimpse ahead of the woke curve because my girlfriend was in a humanities department. They were in the ballpark of as crazy then as they are now, but the movement didn't have fangs yet, outside certain small and isolated spheres of dominion (such as, evidently, clinical psych departments, even in the Southern United States).
In my observation, there was never an inflection point from 1990 to 2020 -- just a steadily accelerating creep, into more and more places, to ever increasing effect, of identity politics and leftist authoritarianism.
NelsonRushton
4mo ago
Thanks. I changed this to:
if you want a litmus test for likely Marxists, current or former member of the Communist party is a pretty good one, and yet there was no systematic effort by the Nazis to exterminate them, of the sort that was directed against Jews.
Upwards of 20% of the KDP (communist party of Germany) in Germany were killed by the Nazis so I think this is fair to say.
chapters 13 and 14, not 3 and 4.
OK I see, you are quoting Chapter 13 not Chapter 3. Looks like the Babylonians are in for some Old Testament justice.
This is something I will address at greater length in my next post (note that it was me who first brought up Moses in connection with Genocide), but long story short is this: if we compare Mein Kampf and Isaiah, one is self-righteous, entitled, and enraged, and the other his humble, repentant, and resolved. Jamming on the enemy in itself has nothing to do with identity politics.
There is also an important question of fact here. The moral axiom that connects Judeo-Christian foreign policy , so to speak, from the bronze age to the 20th century is this: like a police officer making an arrest, you are obligated to handle your enemies with the lightest touch you safely can -- but no lighter, and them's the breaks. As a matter of fact, in the bronze age, the lightest touch you can safely use, when bordering a near-peer ruthless belligerent, may be enslavement or genocide (what is your other option? "I guess that war is over; whew; you can all go home now; better luck next time wiping us out and raping our wives and daughters "). But I do not believe Jews per se were threat to Germany at all -- even if Marxism was a threat to Germany (which it was), and Jews were disproportionally Marxist (which they were). The 30,000 Jews who won medals for bravery in WWI were certainly not a threat to Germany -- but many of those very men, and their families, perished in Nazi death camps all the same.
Now how did Hitler think when the shoe was on the other foot, and his own tribe was being a pest and got their asses kicked? If the allied cause was a Jewish conspiracy like Hitler charged, then he should have expected Old Testament justice at Versailles. Austria and Prussia, and their union in the German Empire, had fought bloody wars of aggression against the allies with whom they sought terms at Versailles, and in some cases against their fathers and grandfathers. So by Hitler's own logic, the allies would have been within their rights to push for a final solution to the German Problem while they had the upper hand. But the Versailles treaty, hard as it was on Germany, was not the Holocaust (not the same ballpark, not the same sport) -- and yet what did Hitler say about it? Vae Victus? No. What did we do to deserve this? Not exactly. He said it was an unfair, unjust, absolute abomination. Poor baby.
And that's identity politics: group justice with double standards. It is holding that your people are entitled to prey on others whenever the opportunity presents itself, and whining in self-righteous indignation when the shoe is on the other foot. The Hebrews didn't do that, and neither did the pagans.
NelsonRushton
4mo ago
The holocaust's identity aspects weren't unique to Nazi Germany. Jewish pogroms had already been common in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and weren't seen as especially noteworthy.
Few characteristics outside mathematics and the physical sciences are unique to anything, but the matters of frequency and severity are what set things apart. Can you give some examples of pogroms you think are comparable to the Holocaust in scope and severity?
- It's true that ancient people didn't have the same justifications, but they lacked knowledge of genetics.
I don't think identity politics rests on a quantitative understanding of genetics. Everyone knows what tribes, races, and religions are.
The concept of Nazi Germany as uniquely evil wasn't even really a thing during and shortly after ww2
Can you support this, or any of the claims in the last two paragraphs?
Some sort of Rand-by-way-of-Kant view that climate change may very plausibly cause human extinction within a few decades; but that's still no excuse to resort to forced taxation, and if we die because the funds couldn't be raised any other way, so be it,…… is not a take I've very often encountered in the wild, I'll say that much.
I accept it is plausible that climate change will cause human extinction within a few decades. The same is plausible for nuclear war, an asteroid impact, a superbug, a super-volcano, renegade AI, et. al. If there were a policy on the table, with good evidence suggested would mitigate one of those, at reasonable cost, without being liable to cause greater harm of some sort, I would be all ears. Do you know of one? Absent that, I don't think this is relevant unless it is just a thought experiment. If it is a thought experiment, and you are asking hypothetically what I'd say if there were such a policy, I might be open to it -- but everything depends on the details, costs, and consequences, because...
We can't spend 20% of GDP mitigating climate change, 20% mitigating nuclear war, 20% mitigating an asteroid impact, 20% mitigating superbugs, 20% mitigating super-volcanoes, and 20% mitigating runaway AI -- because that adds up to 120%. Would you spend 10% on each one? I bet I can name four more plausible humanity-ending disasters before you post your answer. There is an interminable list of national and global disasters that are plausible within a few decades, and from that I infer that paying heavy costs to mitigate merely-plausible disasters is bad for our health and welfare -- unless some particular disaster is particularly plausible, and some particular plan can be shown to mitigate it without doing more harm than good.
I think trans women criminals should, in fact, go to women's prisons if they want... So you can probably imagine how jarring it was to see it listed quite casually in a list of "crazy ideas" which no non-mind-virus-infected progressive could possibly hold in good faith.
To the object-level point, if we had a crystal ball and a magic genie, we could house all inmates safely and humanely... No, wait, there wouldn't be any inmates, because there wouldn't be any crime, because we'd all be drinking free soda pop and eating rainbow stew for every meal. But, since we don't have a crystal ball or a magic genie, some things can be achieved in a shorter time frame than others. The policy of (1) not housing trans women sex offenders in women's prisons is an issue of living debate which is short-term achievable, while the policy of (2) having a humane prison system is not. If you push for (1) before you can achieve (2), then in the real world you are advocating for what you know, or ought to know, will make prison more dangerous for women. Sometimes you have to break some eggs to make an omelet, but that's not an egg I'm willing to break.
To the meta-level point, I don't have data for the US, but in the UK only about 15% of people firmly believe that trans women sex offenders with penises should be housed in women's prisons [source]. That is about the same as the percentage of Americans who believed that Elvis might still be alive in 2017 [source]. I don't have anything against either the trans-women-are-women crowd or the Elvis-is-alive crowd, but I also don't think I am obliged to consider their beliefs morally tenable or epistemically plausible. If I am talking directly with someone who believes a certain thing, I would politely entertain that thing -- but I can't entertain everything all the time just because somebody somewhere believes it. Some of my beliefs are out of the picture for other people, and vice versa, and I am OK with that. What I'm saying is that some charity is warranted here -- and I think your life would be better if you relax and stop being jarred when people, who are not speaking to you directly, are dismissive of things you believe, especially when you know to be on the fringe. Maybe you're right, even though almost everyone laughs off your theory, like Nikola Tesla or Alfred Wegener -- but even if you're right, it doesn't pay to get wound up about it.
NelsonRushton
4mo ago
I haven't read this book
Good for you.
I hope he would have addressed the obvious objection that this creates a loop.
To understand why he doesn't think this way, you have to realize that in his worldview, the only kind of discrimination that needs to be remedied is discrimination against groups he favors, such as blacks. Discrimination against whites doesn't need to be remedied. So in his mind he is saying, the only remedy to past discrimination against blacks is present discrimination against whites. The only remedy to present discrimination against blacks is future discrimination against whites. No loop there. The discrimination against whites goes on forever, but for him that's not a loop; that's justice.
So, to be clear, this is the strongest retraction of the 2003 article he makes, to your knowledge?
You wrote:
setting up specific standards on the spot that he apparently should have passed for it to be a real retraction.
My standards came from the expectations I had based your description:
Kendi spends an entire chapter self-flagellating about these statements and his other similar youthful views.
Kendi clearly retracts “Europeans are simply a different breed of human,”, but this is in the context discussing the crazy idea that white people are literally aliens from another planet. In the book, he recounts his friend Clarence pushing back against that:
“Answer me this: If Whites are aliens, why is it that Whites and Blacks can reproduce? Humans can’t reproduce with animals on this planet, but Black people can reproduce with alien from another planet? Come on, man, let’s get real.
and then, in the next paragraph, says he was wrong to think whites are a "different breed of humans". Ok, Kendi believes white people are homo sapiens; that's a relief. The rest of the paragraph could be read as backtracking substantial parts of the 2003 article, but it doesn't do that explicitly. Maybe he retracts it more strongly somewhere else, but if this is all there is, my guess is that he doesn't really want to distance himself from it, but has realized he was talking like a Nazi and wants to manufacture plausible deniability. If I had once said what he said, and wanted to retract it, I'd be pretty clear about it. Is this quote the best there is, to your knowledge?
Grandmother, What big teeth you have!
Part 2: Censorship in the Soviet Union
(Note: This continues an earlier post on how Russian intellectuals failed to foresee the brutality of the Soviet communist regime, and discussing certain hallmarks that tyrannical ideologies tend to display, even in their early stages.)
Plato wrote 2500 years ago that when a society ceases to honor virtue, that society is ripe for descent into tyranny. The emerging tyrannical ideology, he wrote, will be advanced by a coalition of drones -- those who do no useful work -- consisting of three separate factions: bureaucrats, criminals, and those who live on handouts [The Republic, VIII]. As they gather power on the road to tyrannical rule, one of the first things the drones begin to do, according to Plato, is to try and silence the speech of their political opponents:
While the keener sort [of drones] speak and act, the rest keep buzzing about the bema [public speech platform] and do not suffer a word to be said on the other side [The Republic, VIII].
Plato’s observation has proven to be prescient: tyrannical regimes have often attempted to silence their political opponents through intimidation and harassment, even before they gained the political power enact legal censorship. The Nazis, for example, while they may have been on the other side of the political spectrum from Plato's archetypal tyrant, began employing such tactics long before they officially came to power in 1933. Indeed, before Nazis were even a viable political force at all, Nazi paramilitary thugs -- "Brownshirts" or "Stormtroopers" -- began harassing attendees and speakers at political gatherings opposed to Naziism.
To be fair, Marxist agitators tried to harass Nazis at their political events as well, and one of the functions of the Brownshirts was to prevent that; and if that was all the Brownshirts had done, they would not have foreshadowed the monstrous tyranny that German Naziism was to become. If you had lived in Germany in 1925 and had been wondering what the Nazis might do if they came to power, one clue would have been their attempts to suppress opposing political speech. Another would be their militant identity politics: advocating discrimination and collective punishment against an alleged historical exploiter class (viz., the Jews). Soviet communism, like Naziism, bore these hallmarks of tyranny early in its emergence, long before the Bolsheviks formed their dictatorial regime. In a previous post I discussed the role of identity politics in the early rise of Soviet communism. This article will discuss the phenomenon of Soviet censorship, which emerged early on in subtle forms, and then unfolded with ever-growing virulence as the ideology rose to power — and which bears a striking resemblance to the cancel culture and censoriousness of today’s woke ideology.
Censorship in the Early Bolshevik Movement
Before October of 1917, the Bolshevik party in Russia was not in a position to censor anything. Indeed, before 1905 the Bolshevik party was not in a position of sufficient power to realistically dream of censoring anything. Yet, even at that time, while giving some lip service to freedom of the press (which he would later revoke), Lenin was advocating strict, top-down orthodoxy and cancel culture within his sphere of control, which at that time consisted of the party itself:
Freedom of speech and the press must be complete. But then freedom of association must be complete too. I am bound to accord you, in the name of free speech, the full right to shout, lie and write to your heart’s content. But you are bound to grant me, in the name of freedom of association, the right to enter into, or withdraw from, association with people advocating this or that view. The party is a voluntary association, which would inevitably break up, first ideologically and then physically, if it did not cleanse itself of people advocating anti-party views. [Lenin (1905): "Party Organisation and Party Literature"]
On one hand this passage may seem innocuous: any organization is entitled to reject, or eject, would-be members who are working against the goals of the organization -- and the goal of the Bolshevik party was an ideological one. On the other hand, for example, even if you think of Donald Trump, or, respectively, Joe Biden, as a despot of some kind, I submit that it would be a bit jarring to hear either one of them speak publicly in the language of cleansing their ranks of anti-party views. It is one thing to say that someone is working toward goals that are inconsistent with those of an organization and is therefore unwelcome in it; it is another thing to label this as a cleansing -- as if anyone who departs from the party line is filth.
Moreover, recall that Lenin did not countenance deviation from (his version of) socialist ideology in the slightest degree [Lenin (1902): "What is to be done?"]. Correspondingly, he writes that there should be no independent press within the socialist movement, but that the only socialist literature should be official party literature:
All Social-Democratic literature must become Party literature. Every newspaper, journal, publishing house, etc., must immediately set about reorganizing its work, leading up to a situation in which it will, in one form or another, be integrated into one Party organization or another. [Lenin (1905): "Party Organization and Party Literature"]
We see that the idea of ideological purity -- intolerant of any deviation and enforced from the top down -- was already present in Lenin's public writing in 1905. In this early stage, Lenin was not yet advocating official government censorship [Kenez (1981): "Lenin and the Freedom of the Press"]. However, by 1917, on the eve of the Bolshevik coup d'etat, Lenin reversed the lip service he had previously given to freedom of the press -- on the grounds that government non-interference merely sets the stage for the spread of misinformation:
The capitalists (and many SRs and Mensheviks following them either through misunderstanding or inertia) call freedom of the press that situation in which censorship is abolished and all parties freely publish any paper they please. In reality this is not freedom of the press, but freedom for the rich, for the bourgeoisie to mislead the oppressed and exploited masses. [Lenin (1917): How to Guarantee the Success of the Constituent Assembly]
As soon as the Bolsheviks seized power October 1917, one of their first actions was to systematically confiscate the presses of major opposing newspapers. Within a year, only one point of view was to be seen in the Russian press -- and within a few years practically every newspaper, theater, and publishing house in the former Russian Empire was under strict supervision, if not direct control, of the Soviet government. All to protect the victims of historical class oppression from misinformation by historical class exploiters and their hangers-on. Of course.
The Blooming of Lenin's Tyranny
Before coming to power in 1917, Lenin had lived through Tsarist censorship and wartime censorship in Russia -- both of which had been applied to his own writing -- in addition to a period of relative freedom of the press, which occurred in the roughly ten-year span between the fall of the Tsar and the entry of Russian into World War I. Having tasted from both wells, Lenin's response could have been to dedicate himself to fighting against censorship and authoritarianism of all kinds. It wasn't.
Decades earlier, Karl Marx had written that the working class, when they had grown sick enough of being oppressed by their employers, would spontaneously revolt and seize power, forming a "dictatorship of the proletariat" with no official government. These ideals of spontaneous working-class revolution and stateless society were fundamental to Marxism, and Lenin opposed them so staunchly that he could not rightly be called a Marxist. Hence, we have the term Marxist-Leninist for the political philosophy of Lenin and his followers in the early Soviet Union. In contrast to Marx, Lenin wrote that the working class would never spontaneously revolt against the foundations of capitalism, but instead would merely try to strike a better deal with their employers though collective bargaining and moderate government regulation. He believed, therefore, that the working class would have to be guided from without, so to speak, by forceful intellectual and political leaders:
We have said that there could not have been Social-Democratic consciousness among the workers. It would have to be brought to them from without. The history of all countries shows that the working class, exclusively by its own effort, is able to develop only trade union consciousness, i.e., the conviction that it is necessary to combine in unions, fight the employers, and strive to compel the government to pass necessary labour legislation, etc. The theory of socialism, however, grew out of the philosophic, historical, and economic theories elaborated by educated representatives of the propertied classes, by intellectuals...
To belittle the socialist ideology in any way, to turn aside from it in the slightest degree means to strengthen bourgeois ideology. There is much talk of spontaneity. But the spontaneous development of the working-class movement leads to its subordination to bourgeois ideology, ... Hence, our task, the task of Social-Democracy, is to combat spontaneity, to divert the working-class movement from this spontaneous, trade-unionist striving to come under the wing of the bourgeoisie, and to bring it under the wing of revolutionary Social Democracy. [Lenin (1902): What is to be done?]
Reading Lenin's words in 1902, one might have wondered how, exactly, the working class was to be "brought under the wing of the socialist party", and induced not to "turn aside from it [Marxist-Leninist ideology] in the slightest degree". Could Lenin have meant that the people just need a good talking to, in order to achieve and maintain ideological purity? In hindsight we know that is not what he meant by any means, but we also know that many people -- even within the party and sympathetic to it -- were blindsided by murderous brutality of the regime that would emerge from the Bolshevik Revolution. I submit that the signs they missed included Lenin's contemptuous intellectual elitism, his sense of being entitled to be agreed with and obeyed (under the wing), and his militant intolerance of opposing ideas even before he had the power to legally censor them. Sound familiar?
Ideologically speaking, Lenin pivoted away from Marx's notion of a "dictatorship of the proletariat", and towards a dictatorship on behalf of the proletariat, but directed by the communist government, led by himself. In case one wondered what Lenin meant by dictatorship, he would soon make that quite clear: "dictatorship means unlimited power based on force" [Lenin (1906): The Victory of the Cadets]. In theory, practically unlimited power might be used exclusively for kind and helpful purposes: to fight injustice, and rescue the oppressed from their oppressors, like Superman and the Fantastic Four. That is the way Lenin talked about using his power before he got it, but people who strive for power sometimes do not to use it the way they say they are going to. Those who champion a narrative of militant identity politics -- that is, collective punishment of historical class oppressors -- are particularly likely to bloom into tyrants as they gather power. If, in addition, they have a strong impulse to control what other people are allowed to say and write, then it is practically a theorem that they will abuse whatever political power they eventually get their hands on.
NelsonRushton
4mo ago
Well, darn. I tried to piece the contents of that book together from snippets without reading it, because I don't want to buy it on principle and I couldn't find the full text online. Now I have to spend Saturday at the book store reading it in an easy chair.
Thanks for the info. I will make appropriate edits when I have time.
Yes, people need a justification for what they're doing. But there is a lot of freedom in how that justification generalizes.
This is not something Plato touches on directly, but I have an idea about it. The guiding principle, if you can call it that, is a collective decision by the drones on the central question in founding any fundamentalist/extremist movement: As a function of the material and cultural circumstances I find myself in, what group can I demonize, scapegoat, and rally a coalition to attack and plunder? The details of the target group, the moral rationalization, and the attack strategy arise from culture and circumstance -- but when they find the answer it then plays out in (1) censoring the target group and their ideas, (2) scapegoating them for all the world's ills, (3) disarming them, (4) seizing their property in the name of justice, and often finally (5) murder. The target group is chosen opportunistically, not according to any eternal principle. Depending on circumstances, it could be heretics, Jews, the aristocracy, the Tutsis, the vaguely defined and ever-morphing "bourgeoisie", or straight white males. The tyranny Plato observed must have been of the left-wing variety, like that of Stalin and Mao -- but the dragon can wear the mask of the left, the right, religious fundamentalism, racial supremacy, or whatever.
Plato's "crawling drones" are thugs and paupers, that tend to stoke leftist tyranny, but leftist tyranny is just one of many possible answers to the question of who can I blame for my problems and attack and plunder with righteous indignation?
Also, that's pretty much a summary of the top-level post I am planning for next week.
NelsonRushton
5mo ago
Thanks. For every person that says this, there are probably 10 or more who feel it.
By "concise", do you mean (A) broken into smaller pieces per post (B), having less content altogether, or (C) putting the same content into fewer words? "Concision" usually refers to (C), but maybe that is not what you are saying.
NelsonRushton
5mo ago
suspicion that most social conflicts are between the same impulses we've had for thousands of years. Maybe I gotta finally read the Republic. Is there a translation you recommend? Any prerequisite baseline level of familiarity with Greek?
I have been working from Benjamin Jowett's translation. His is easy to find online, as is Paul Shorey's in the Perseus digital library. I haven't looked at different translations enough to make a recommendation.
No need to know Greek unless you are reading it in Greek. I only know a few Greek words myself. I look up some of the key words in a Greek dictionary using a pain-in-the-ass process:
- Take part of the Greek text from the Perseus Library that I think has the word in it
- Put it in Google Translate
- Cut out parts of it and see if the target word (or something like it) remains in the translation, narrowing it down until I find the Greek word
- Look it up in Strong's Greek Dictionary, or some other Greek dictionary online.
I used to use ChatGPT for this, and it was awesome, until I realized that it doesn't always give me the same answer when I ask the same question twice. i.e., it's cull of crap.
I need a friend who knows ancient Greek.
Had to fix it, but it was cool while it lasted. The typo will live on in this comment.
NelsonRushton
4mo ago
Press X to doubt.
The fact that it is doubtful is itself of first importance, because it is beyond doubt that, say, the Romans were pagans, if "pagan" means anything. On the other hand if "pagan" means anything, there must also be religious practices that are or were not pagan.
Most predicates outside math and the hard sciences are fuzzy, that is, matters of degrees -- and finding threads of truth to "x satisfies P" is always easy but also therefore always uninformative. The questions in this case are (1) is "pagan", as opposed to non-pagan, a meaningful (if of course rough) categorical distinction among religious practices? (2) if so what are its characteristics, and what are its alternatives and their characteristics? and (3) do the Hebrews fall inside or outside of the "pagan" cluster, by comparison with its paragons such as Rome and pre-Christian Scandanavia?
Are you saying yes, (something), and yes? If so I'd like to know what the something is. That is not the commonsense answer so you owe a good argument, beginning with an explicit answer to (2): what is it to be pagan, and what are the alternatives?
I would like to understand the pro-Israel position better
Coleman Hughes puts the case for the Israel beautifully in this 2 minute video: https://youtube.com/watch?v=ZloHekt7WLo
I don't think the Israel-Palestine conflict can be understood without considering the facts that (1) Hamas, and the Palestinian people in aggregate, are strategically committed to genocide against the Jewish people, and (2) Hamas, with the enthusiastic support of the Palestinian people, deliberately embeds themselves into the civilian population in such a way that their operatives cannot be brought to justice for acts of terror without high civilian casualties. If you don't believe those two things, then the occupation looks unjust, and the Palestinian civilian casualties like a moral outrage that can be blamed on Israel. If you do believe those things, then Israel is taking just and necessary steps to defend themselves, and the Palestinian civilian casualties look like a moral outrage that can be blamed on Hamas. By analogy, suppose someone broke into my house and started killing members of my family, and he was holding his 1-year-old daughter in front of his chest as a human shield; I take a shot and accidentally hit the girl. The death of that child is his fault, not mine. In a similar case where his daughter is 10 years old and is deliberately acting as a human shield for him as he continues to stab members of my family, her death on him and her, but not me.
My opinion is that Israel has the right to defend itself by waging war against Hamas -- and also that, since Israel has overwhelming military superiority, they have an obligation to do this with the lightest touch they safely afford to. But Oct. 7 showed that Israel has heretofore been applying a lighter touch than they can safely afford to -- and so a heavier touch, so to speak, is called for. This "heavier touch" means that thousands of Palestinians will be killed, some of whom are completely innocent -- and the blame for that catastrophe lies entirely with Hamas and their civilian collaborators.
The objective of genocide against the Jews is stated in Hamas's 1988 charter. In the early 2000's, the ruling party of Palestine was Fatah, a terrorist organization. Before the 2006 elections, Fatah renounced terrorism as a tactic, but Hamas did not. Subsequently, Hamas became more popular and they won 74 seats in Palestinian parliament, a majority, compared with Fatah's 45. Since then, Hamas has controlled the schools and media in Gaza and the Palestinian population has become even more fanatical in their genocidal hatred of Israel. The analogous situation in the US would be if the KKK and the Aryan Brotherhood were the two major political parties, the KKK renounced terrorism, and as a result the AB pulled ahead in the polls and won majorities in both houses. But it is still not analogous because the AB doesn't strategically target black noncombatants. Hamas is morally worse than the KKK and the AB; they are more comparable to the Nazis, but they have much broader public support in their home country. They even use the same pretext as the Nazis: those people perpetrated a grievous historical wrong against us, and so we want them all dead, whether they individually had a hand in the alleged wrong or not.
If you are continuously denied justice in an existential matter, though, I don't think it's at all an alien viewpoint that you are morally entitled to do whatever you find appropriate to seize justice for yourself,
In the abstract, this is the case for Palestine. If you look at it in the abstract and in a vacuum, it makes sense, but I don't think we should look at it in the abstract and a vacuum. Instead, we should compare the response of the Palestinians to the way they have been treated to the responses of other groups who have been treated badly. We didn't see this kind of terrorism from the counties occupied by the Russian Empire or the Soviet Union. Are the Palestinians being treated worse than the Ukrainians were in the Holodomor? (Hell no) Ukraine's ancestral homeland was occupied, and, unlike the Palestinians, they were really targeted for genocide. We didn't see this behavior from 1st Century Christians in the Roman Empire (who, in the latter case, were really targeted for genocide). We don't see it by Armenians against Azerbaijan, we didn't see it when France and Poland were occupied by Germany; We don't see it from the Comanches or the Sioux today; etc., etc., etc.
When somebody says, "how would you feel if...", the very fact that they have to make up this hypothetical means that they cannot think of a historical example of a morally justified campaign of terror against a civilian population by an allegedly oppressed civilization. And the reason there are no examples is that in the real world, civilized people do not respond to oppression with campaigns of murder of civilians on the other side. In a hypothetical, you might imagine that they do, or that you would -- but they don't and you wouldn't.
If you want to argue in the direction that my historical examples above aren't comparable to the Palestinian case, then that itself demonstrates that you cannot make a moral case for Hamas. If you wanted to (validly) argue that the Palestinian response is moral, you would have to either (1) assert that the Palestinians have gotten shafted worse than any other group in history ever has, or (2) point to historical examples of morally justified campaigns of homicide against civilians, morally comparable to that of Hamas in terms of their justification and methods (e.g., in their use of human shields, the degree to which they preferentially target civilians, and their stated objective of genocide). You might argue, for example, that (A) IRA terrorism is or was morally justified, and that (B) the tactics of the IRA are morally comparable to those of Hamas. Or you might argue that the French Underground in WWII was comparable to Hamas in their justification and in their tactics. Would you make one of those arguments, or any other such argument based on a historical example rather than a hypothetical or an abstraction? You have all of recorded history to choose from.
Corrected this to "What it did accomplish was to murder 25 million Russian people, plus or minus 15 million,". 25 million seems to be the midpoint of the mainstream scholarly estimates, with a low of around 10 and a high of around 40, according to Wikipedia.
Personally, I find R.J. Rummel credible, and he put the Soviet number at 60 million in his book Death by Government [source], which in my opinion justifies my original claim of 40 million plus or minus 20 -- but you reminded me that I should use more conservative numbers, lest someone be tempted to pick nits as an excuse to ignore the spirit of the argument. They will probably find another excuse anyway, but I want to do due diligence.
Currently, I do think it's a nitpick to insist that "Russian" means "ethnically Russian", but I will check with my Russian friends and see what they think.
Update: One of my Russian friends responds as follows:
I don’t see why it’s inaccurate to use the term “Russian” since colloquially it meant “anyone who lived under the Soviet regime”.
Thanks for the correction.
I'm surprised this has not been the go-to explanation in the discussion. The clue is not that Hitler is stigmatized, but the pattern of the what Moldbug calls the "cathedral" minimizing and excusing communist atrocities even after they became known. I think this pattern is obvious.
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