NelsonRushton
Doctorate in mathematics, specializing in probability theory, from the University of Georgia. 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
NelsonRushton
2d ago
Ideally they would be welcome in a muslim country. They could go to Egypt. No wait Egypt has a fortified barrier with Gaza -- more heavily fortified than their border with Israel -- to keep them out of Egypt. They could immigrate to Lebanon. No wait they were kicked out of Lebanon for inciting terrorism. They could go to Jordan. No wait they were kicked out of Jordan for inciting terrorism. Maybe they could to Kuwait. No wait they were kicked out of Kuwait for inciting terrorism. I'd say they can go to hell but they would probably be kicked out of there too.
NelsonRushton
2d ago
Lost all credibility for me when he said that of there was a Palestinian state that the fighting would stop. "From the river to the sea Palestine will be free" means the entire area of what is now israel will be "free" of Jews. And where are these Jews supposed to go? It says in hamas's 1988 charter where they are supposed to go (to their graves) and they have never changed their tune. When Fatah renounced terrorism, Hamas became the most popular party among the people of Gaza, and they won the 2006 Palestinian elections on a platform of terror and hatred. As Douglas Murray said, it there was a Palestinian state it would be a Nazi state.
NelsonRushton
2d ago
If I understand the analogy correctly this is an important question. I think part of the answer is that it's a tragedy if the commons. You pay a personal cost for combating wokeness, but your individual vote, campaigning, etc. is unlikely to have a discernable effect: if policy is going to change it is going to be the work of thousands or millions of people a d will happen with or without your effort. Even taking the time and effort to show up at the voting booth on election day incurs a personal cost with no personal gain.
The same thing is true of as a soldier in battle, of sticking your head up over the sandbags to fire a shot at the enemy. The war will be won or lost no matter what you do, but you risk getting shot when you engage with the enemy. Your motive is one of principle one, while the risk is a material one. When enough people withdraw from honor and principle and cling to the material, nothing else can happen but what we are seeing.
NelsonRushton
10d ago
What's interesting about Lenin's writings is that he's usually pretty forthright about what he wanted and planned.
Yet so many people thought, "It's just a figure of speech; he doesn't really mean...". Kind of like Hamas.
Lenin was not exactly secretive, but from my reading his tone did become more militant as time went on, at least up until 1917 -- and, secretive or not, the carnage caught many people by surprise. It reminds me of the woke meme, what did you think decolonization meant?.
Grandmother, What big teeth you have!
Part 2: Censorship and Authoritarianism in the Russian Revolution
(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 Soviet authoritarianism and censorship -- both of which emerged early on in subtle forms, and then unfolded with ever-growing virulence as the ideology rose to power.
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
13d ago
Tell me what you really, really want to happen if you "win"? Most leftists won't come out and say "I want Israel to be destroyed." Some of them will give some sort of pie-in-the-sky one state answer, like above. But the reality is that the literal destruction of Israel is the only real "win condition" for them.
Hear, hear!
I also feel that if a return to a sufficient level of realpolitik and putting Western interests first is ever going to be pulled into the Overton window at this point
What we have seen up to this point in the spread of wokeness (including anti-West, victim-class politics) is unfathomable craziness and stupidity, but not material threats to the safety and comfort of the upper middle class and the wealthy. I would guess that those threats are coming soon (within a generation, or two at the most), and I think that could change the Overton window dramatically. If you've read the Old Testament, it is a familiar pattern (substituting "wokeness" in current events for "idolatry" in the Hebrew Bible).
I am not particularly optimistic (as, say, Vivek Ramaswamy is) about what will come next after that; it might be right wing tyranny. (If you had visited Germany in the early 1920's you might have thought, "What a zoo! Look at all these Marxists rioting in the streets, and all this open sexual deviance!). But I do agree with Ramaswamy that wokeness is likely to eat itself as its material consequences begin to be felt by the new oligarchs.
This is such an extreme claim about Hamas that I would want to see evidence from it,
This claim of fact isn't central to my point and if you don't accept it I withdraw it. The point is this:
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). I would be wary of applying an abstract moral principle to a controversial case, if there is not a single factually comparable case to which it can also be applied.
So do you want to (validly) argue that the Palestinian response is moral? If so do you accept that you would have to agree to either (1) or (2), and if so, which do you agree to?
If you claim, for example, that (A) the IRA is generally justified in how it prosecutes its campaign and (B) the IRA's methods and objectives are morally comparable to those of Hamas, then we have something to talk about. But if there is no such claim you would make about any organization in history other than Hamas, then that would be notable.
After researching your sources, I found enough evidence to withdraw the example from the post -- though implicitly I was referring to the Roman occupation in the Second Temple Period rather than the Kitos War.
It would be nice if you cited your sources more precisely, by author name, date, and document name, preferably with a link. I notice you did not name the document by Cassius Dio, or quote it, which is peculiar because it is pretty juicy in support of your point:
Meanwhile the Jews in the region of Cyrene had put one Andreas at their head and were destroying both the Romans and the Greeks. They would cook their flesh, make belts for themselves of their entrails, anoint themselves with their blood, and wear their skins for clothing. Others they would give to wild beasts and force still others to fight as gladiators [Cassius Dio (c .30BC): Dio's Roman History, Chapter 70 passage 32]
I think the current consensus (right or wrong) is that that quote makes Dio less credible, and in any case that is also my opinion. I don't find the other sources credible in their details either -- but I agree they are enough to show by a preponderance of the evidence that the Jewish rebellion in the Kitos War was tactically targeting Greek and Roman civilians.
NelsonRushton
13d ago
(A) IRA terrorism is or was morally justified... Yes, in my opinion. (Also the ETA and a lot of other examples like that
This is only half of the argument, my friend. The reason (A) was given a label is because it was conjoined with (B): the IRA's tactics and objectives are morally comparable to those of Hamas. That would entail that the IRA maximizes civilian casualties on their own side tactically, targets primarily civilians on the other side, and has the death of all Englishmen as a persistent and publicly stated objective. I assume you don't assert those things but I could be mistaken.
NelsonRushton
14d ago
Let's start with number three, because that is the one that surprises me. (1) The city government of NYC is woke AF, (2) so is the administration of Columbia U, and (3) one element of the woke agenda is a strong leaning toward both Palestine and BLM to the point of permitting illegal protests for both. Do you affirm or deny (1), (2), and (3)?
NelsonRushton
14d ago
I read your post and you mentioned "vile and ineffectual resistance" but I don't see where you mentioned genocide as a strategic objective. That is to say Hamas and a critical mass of the Palestinian citizens want all of the Jews dead as an ultimate objective, whether they have a state or not. You assent to that as a matter of fact and think it is a morally defensible position?
NelsonRushton
14d ago
Respectively,
- Nothing is being molded by anyone. Petition for redress of grievances is business as usual.
- If it is illegal then it is newsworthy, but what law is being broken and by what conduct?
- BLM is not the other side from the pro Hamas protests; it is the same side. Both are illegal and both should have been dispersed by police immediately. If it was MAGA protesters they would have been.
NelsonRushton
14d ago
The big media outlets don't seem to be interested in this story. Maybe that is because they are controlled by a Jewish syndicate, or maybe it is because it isn't a big deal. I go with "isn't a big deal". If they were conspiring to break the law that would be a big deal; if they were conspiring to change the law it would be at least interesting -- but what is happening here is that they are "conspiring" to enforce the law -- which they would already be enforcing, with prejudice, if a group on the other side were doing the same thing. So, so what?
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.
NelsonRushton
16d ago
I think a definition of woke which includes practically every political movement ever is not a very useful definition and flies in the face of common usage.
This, partly, was my point. The definition of wokeness I was applying, taken from the Oxford dictionary (explicitly, using the phrase "in the dictionary sense"), does not reflect the common use of the word. If you read carefully, I never said Hitler, Stalin, etc. were woke. I said (1) their propaganda was rife with woke sounding platitudes, and that (2) their stated agendas fit the dictionary definition (but not the actual meaning in common sense) of wokeness.
But the reader shouldn't have to read that carefully to get the message, so I edited the first paragraph as follows to clarify that the dictionary definition of "woke" that I am using here does not reflect the common use of the word:
As of this writing, the Oxford English Dictionary defines wokeness as being alert to injustice and discrimination in society, especially racism. The dictionary entry doesn't mention radical progressivism, censorship, collective punishment, or selective enforcement of criminal laws. Indeed, the Oxford definition does not mention, or even suggest, anything actually associated with wokeness, as opposed to non-wokeness, in the sense that the word is actually used. I submit this is because the dictionary's authors are woke (or else pretending to be, in order to avoid censorship and collective punishment).
NelsonRushton
17d ago
Virtually everyone sees their ingroup as a victim who is treated unjustly by their outgroup.
I think this covers up an important truth. There is an important difference in this respect between "virtually everyone" on the one hand, and, on the other hand, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and their ilk. It is one thing to feel like your clan has gotten the short end of some particular stick, but it is another thing to feel like that justifies negating the human rights of your countrymen in the entire offending class. Of course you can find, to some degree, talking heads of any class talking about how their group has been treated unfairly, but when that rises to a certain pitch and tone, you'd best keep your rifle clean.
NelsonRushton
17d ago
A claim that Soviets killed 10-15 million instead of 40-60 million would be an exceedingly odd one from a point of radical leftism, since it's still far too many killed people for communists to be comfortable with it, and anarchists and others would presumably not care that much either way, since they would see Soviet Union as a bad thing either way.
I don't think it's odd at all. They can't completely whitewash the numbers in one generation, but they want an excuse to (1) quibble with anyone who points out the atrocities by disputing their numbers, (2) use that as an excuse not to listen to them, and (3) doctor the numbers so that they can say that Naziism, or the Westward expansion of the United States, or something else besides the philosophy they espouse killed the most people ever.
NelsonRushton
17d ago
There are two definitions of woke on the table; there is the dictionary definition and there is what people refer to in practice as "woke". These are not the same and I am referring explicitly to the Oxford dictionary definition, which does not reference leftism in any way. Hitler definitely espoused a message of wokeness in the dictionary sense, casting the Jews, Slavs, industrialists as historical class exploiters and using this as a pretext for seizing various assets on behalf of the Volk (folks; people). A case can be made that the Ayatollahs were/are woke as well. I don't consider Hirohito a "mass murdering tyrant" because he was beloved by his people and didn't directly kill them.
Thanks for the feedback.
I am surprised you didn't cite a dictionary in your semantic "quibbles". According to Webster's online dictionary, for example,
- Identity politics: politics in which groups of people having a particular racial, religious, ethnic, social, or cultural identity tend to promote their own specific interests or concerns without regard to the interests or concerns of any larger political group
- pogrom : an organized massacre of helpless people. specifically : such a massacre of Jews
and per dictionary.com:
- identity politics: political activity or movements based on or catering to the cultural, ethnic, gender, racial, religious, or social interests that characterize a group identity
- pogrom: an organized massacre, especially of Jews
In light of that, I left in the reference to "identity politics", but changed "pogrom" to "campaign of political violence" to avoid the suggestion (though not the strict denotation) of a pogrom specifically against Jews.
NelsonRushton
17d ago
Good point. Thanks. Edit made.
NelsonRushton
17d ago
He was also writing before woke radical leftism took over the humanities in American academia. So who knows?
They also promised to terminate Russian involvement in the ongoing world war and sue for a separate peace. Which, I guess, was more important of a factor than this.
That was certainly an important factor in the popularity of the Bolshevik regime from 1914 to 1918, and perhaps as you suggest a more important factor -- but the question being addressed here (as indicated by the first sentence of the paragraph you quoted) is not why the 1917 Revolution was successful, but why the murderous despotism of the emerging Communist regime was not more widely foreseen from within Russia (or, for that matter, from within the United States and Western Europe), even before Russian involvement World War I.
I think Russians will probably be more fine with that than ex-Soviet non-Russians would be.
When you say that mainstream scholarly estimates are about 25 million, how does that break down between the three categories above? 25 million doesn't make much sense to me just because: Russian civil war deaths were about 10 million and I think at most you could probably only ascribe about third of those to direct or indirect killing of civilians by communists. Estimates of the Holodomor death range from about 3-7 million. The Great Purge killed fewer than a million, and if you add all the other purges on top it probably adds another few hundred thousand as far as I know. Various ethnic resettlements killed maybe another million.
Here historian Stephens Kotkin attributes 18 to 20 million deliberate killings of civilians to Lenin and Stalin combined, not including war deaths or deaths by mismanagement. I do not know what events he totals to get that number.
My original numbers came from combining the low and high numbers for Stalin and Lenin from the table found here, but the numbers have changed since I last looked at them. The range from the current table would 10 million to 52 million (30 million plus or minus 20 million) depending on how you count. However, now that I read more closely, the high number can't be justified as a total murdered because it includes all excess deaths.
So, fair enough, I removed the word "Russian" and replaced the numbers with "some 20 million", citing Kotkin as the source.
Great post. I wish you would post more.
More options
Context Copy link