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
Say then, my friend : Plato on Democracy and Tyranny
(c) J. Nelson Rushton. January 27, 2025 Note: this is the second post in a series. The first one is here.
The ring of power has a will of its own. It betrayed Isildur, to his death. And some things that should not have been forgotten were lost. History became legend. Legend became myth. And for two and a half thousand years, the ring passed out of all knowledge. Until, when chance came, the ring ensnared a new bearer.
-- Spoken by the elf-queen Galadriel in Lord of the Rings
Some people believe that wokeness emerged from the progressive counterculture of the 1960’s. Some hold that it has its roots in the 1930's with FDR and the New Deal. Others say that the origins of wokeness go back to the Frankfurt School of economics in 1920's Germany. Whatever wokeness is at its core, and whether it is good or bad, I submit that it is in fact older than any of that -- and, indeed, very old. That is the main thesis of this essay.
In The Republic, Book VIII (c. 375 BC), Plato described a faction whose social and political agenda included moral relativism, lax enforcement of criminal laws, multiculturalism, equality of outcomes, and the repudiation of their society’s founding principles and traditional values. Plato called the adherents of this ideology dēmokratikoi andres [democratic men]. Plato wrote that a state ruled by such "democratic men" is on the brink of descending into tyranny. Steps along the path to tyranny, as Plato described it, include sexual liberation and equality, aggressive taxation of the rich, expansion of the welfare state, open borders, forgiveness of debts, suppression of dissenting speech, and the confiscation of weapons owned by private citizens. Today, many with a similar agenda refer to themselves as "progressives". Most of them, I suppose, are unaware that they are "progressing" toward a vision of the world that dates back at least two and a half thousand years.
Philosopher Alfred North Whitehead once wrote, the safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato [Whitehead (1929): Process and Reality]. Whitehead was exaggerating, of course -- but at any rate this essay will consist literally of a series of footnotes to Plato. To the extent that there is truth in Whitehead's witticism, the difference between this and any other work in the Western canon is that I am up front about what I am doing.
Overview of The Republic, Book VIII
In The Republic, Book VIII (c. 375 BC), Plato takes the view that the chief distinguishing characteristics of a person is the set of virtues that person honors. He sorts men into five basic categories, according to the virtues they honor most:
- The aristocratic man honors wisdom and integrity.
- The timocratic man honors martial valor, skill at arms, and military prowess.
- The oligarchical man honors wealth, and the virtues that enable a person to acquire wealth, such as industriousness and ambition
- The democratic man honors nothing in particular -- and therefore indulges his appetites without restraint.
- The tyrannical man honors, or in this case we might say bows down to, the merciless exercise of power.
Plato wrote that a nation's form of government emerges naturally from the values of its citizens, and in particular from the virtues they honor. In Plato's view, when the people of a society honor a certain virtue, they raise up leaders who exhibit that virtue -- and, conversely, when citizens fail to honor a certain virtue, they raise up leaders in whom that virtue is absent. The virtues present and absent in these leaders in turn determine the general character of the government. Thus, Plato writes that in principle there are five basic forms of government, corresponding to the five basic sorts of citizen (though, in practice, any given state is liable to be a mixture of these pure forms):
Do you know that Governments vary as the dispositions of men vary, and that there must be as many of the one as there are of the other? For we cannot suppose that states are made of oak and rock, and not out of the human natures which are in them.
-- The Republic, Book VIII
The five forms government considered by Plato in The Republic are as follows:
- The aristokratíā is society ruled by men of exceptional wisdom and integrity, because its citizens most honor and admire those traits. Aristokratíā is usually translated as aristocracy, but Plato's intent is quite different from the modern meaning of that word. Plato holds aristokratíā (qua, rule by the wise) to be the ideal form of government, while he explicitly repudiates aristocracy in the modern sense, viz., the rule of hereditary nobles.
- Plato defines a timocracy as a state ruled by men with a record of exemplary military service -- because its citizens honor the martial virtues most highly. Plato cites Crete and Sparta as examples.
- He defines an oligarchy as a state governed, officially as well as unofficially, by the wealthy -- who are elevated to power and prestige by a citizenry who prizes wealth and the virtues that enable one to acquire wealth, such as industriousness, sharp dealing, and ambition.
- Plato uses the word dēmokratía to mean a state ruled by men of no particular virtue -- who are elevated to positions of power, one way or another, by citizens who do not honor virtue. Dēmokratía is usually rendered into English as democracy, but Plato's concept of dēmokratía differs importantly from the modern understanding of democracy, as will be discussed below.
- A tyrannía, for Plato, is a state ruled by a dictator who has seized power in a revolution or coup d'etat -- with popular support the majority of the population, who welcome such a dictator over them. Tyrannía is usually translated as tyranny. Note that while the words "tyrant" and "tyranny" have a generally negative connotations today, this was less true of their ancient Greek precursors týrannos and tyrannía. Like the word "Marxism" today, there were apparently some in ancient Greece who had an affinity for tyrannía, and some who had an antipathy for it. Plato was one who had antipathy.
Book VIII of The Republic is presented as a narrative relating an archetypal story of how societies can decay over time -- from the ideal form of government, aristokratíā, to the worst form, tyrannía, and passing through the three intermediate forms along the way. At each stage in the process, the regime-change is affected by a change in the values of the public, in terms of the virtues they honor. In other words, for Plato, politics is downstream of culture.
It is easy to see how politics could be downstream of culture in a modern democracy -- because the voting populace consists of the entire adult population, who confer official authority upon whomever they wish. It is less easy to see how politics would be downstream of culture in, say, a timocracy (military rule) or oligarchy (rule by the wealthy), where one class of people has an exclusive hold on official power. The question is why would the class-in-power willingly abdicate that power, or how could it be wrested from them by others with no official authority? One factor in such a transfer of power could be violent revolution or the threat of it -- but it seems that for Plato, this is not the only factor, or even the chief factor. On the whole, the transfers of power from one class to another in Plato's narrative hinge more on moral suasion and perceived legitimacy than on threats or force. The driving force (or the control variable, so to speak) in Plato's theory of political and societal change is what Thomas Paine called the constitution of the people -- that is, the moral character of society. This stands in contradistinction to Karl Marx's theory of dialectical materialism, in which the driving forces of societal change consists in the material conditions under which people live, including the laws they have written on paper.
Plato's Dēmokratía and the Democratic Man
Foreshadowing the Christian doctrine of the “will of the flesh”, Plato argues that men's hearts are naturally home to unclean carnal passions:
I mean those [passions] which are awake when the reasoning and human and ruling power is asleep; then the wild beast within us, gorged with meat or drink, starts up and having shaken off sleep, goes forth to satisfy his desires; and there is no conceivable folly or crime -- not excepting incest or any other unnatural union, or parricide, or the eating of forbidden food -- which at such a time, when he has parted company with all shame and sense, a man may not be ready to commit.... In all of us, even in good men, there is a lawless wild-beast nature, which peers out in sleep.
-- The Republic, Book IX
He writes that while all men have these beastly desires, they are restrained, more in some people and less than others, by law (nomos) and reason (logos):
Certain of the unnecessary pleasures and appetites I conceive to be unlawful; every one appears to have them, but in some persons they are controlled by the laws and by reason.
--The Republic, Book IX
When a society is in decline toward disregard of virtue, it will be a mixture of those who have some regard for virtue left (in particular, "oligarchical" virtues such as industriousness and temperance), and those who have little or none. However, the less virtuous citizens may gradually corrupt the more virtuous and recruit them into their ranks. This recruitment proceeds by Orwellian manipulation of language -- by calling good things evil and evil things good -- and has a religious character, as if the target is being indoctrinated into a cult:
There is a battle and they [a man's less virtuous associates] gain the day, and then modesty, which they call silliness, is ignominiously thrust into exile by them, and temperance, which they nickname unmanliness, is trampled in the mire and cast forth; they persuade men that moderation and orderly expenditure are vulgarity and meanness, and so, by the help of a rabble of evil appetites, they drive them [the man's virtues] beyond the border.
And when they have emptied and swept clean the soul of him who is now in their power and who is being initiated by them in great mysteries, the next thing is to bring back to their house insolence and anarchy and waste and impudence in bright array having garlands on their heads, and a great company with them, hymning their praises and calling them by sweet names; insolence they term breeding, and anarchy liberty, and waste magnificence, and impudence courage. And so the young man passes out of his original nature, which was trained in the school of necessity, into the freedom and libertinism of useless and unnecessary pleasures.
-- The Republic, VIII
Through this process, the recruit is finally transformed into a full blown dimokratikos anēr [Greek: democratic man], who no longer distinguish between clean and unclean desires:
If any one says to him that some pleasures are the satisfactions of good and noble desires, and others of evil desires, and that he ought to use and honour some and chastise and master the others -- whenever this is repeated to him he shakes his head and says that they are all alike, and that one is as good as another... Let him then be set over against democracy; he may truly be called the democratic man.
-- The Republic, VIII
Plato writes that as more and more men within a society are corrupted, the entire society is transformed toward a state of dēmokratía, or virtueless society. Dēmokratía is a challenging word to translate. It is usually rendered as democracy, and its meaning is something like democracy (in the modern sense) in that it entails relatively broad and equal participation in government. In Plato's narrative, however, dēmokratía entails much more: a thoroughgoing ethos of equity, in which people regarded, not only having equal rights of life, liberty and property, but also as being of equal ability, uprightness, and achievement -- regardless of their actual respective degrees of ability, uprightness, or achievement.
According to Plato, the virtueless society has a freewheeling spirit of moral relativism -- and, in that spirit, discards the principles of its national constitution.
See too, I said, the forgiving spirit of democracy, and the 'don't care' about trifles, and the disregard which she shows of all the fine principles which we solemnly laid down at the foundation of the city... how grandly does she trample all these fine notions of ours under her feet.
-- The Republic, Book VII
Its public officials are often selected on the basis of their professed loyalty, rather than ability or integrity,
...never giving a thought to the pursuits which make a statesman, and promoting to honour any one who professes to be the people's friend.
-- The Republic, Book VII
or, in some cases, at random by the drawing of lots, presumably on the grounds that "all men are equal" (Strange as this practice may seem to us today, this was indeed the policy of some Greek city-states in and around the time of Plato):
This is the form of government in which the magistrates are commonly elected by lot.
-- The Republic, Book VII
The society that has ceased to honor virtue repudiates meritocracy:
These and other kindred characteristics are proper to democracy, which is a charming form of government, full of variety and disorder, and dispensing a sort of equality to equals and unequals alike.
-- -- The Republic, Book VII
Since all ways of being are held in equal esteem, the people of the dēmokratía are diverse in their norms and values — one might say “multicultural”:
And just as women and children think a variety of colours to be of all things most charming, so there are many men to whom this State, which is spangled with the manners and characters of mankind, will appear to be the fairest of States.
--The Republic, Book VII
Thus, the society loses its sense of shared national identity and social cohesion:
And there being no necessity, I said, for you to govern in this State, even if you have the capacity, or to be governed, unless you like, or go to war when the rest go to war, or to be at peace when others are at peace, unless you are so dispose.
--The Republic, Book VII
In addition to discarding its traditional principles and values, the dēmokratía neglects enforcement of the law, allowing criminals to freely roam the streets:
Have you not observed how, in a democracy, many persons, although they have been sentenced to death or exile, just stay where they are and walk about the world?
--The Republic, Book VII
In summary, the agenda of Plato's democratic men includes moral relativism, leniency in criminal justice, multiculturalism, equality of outcomes, and a loosening of their society's founding principles and traditional values. Sound Familiar?
Plato's Narrative of the Descent into Tyranny
Say then, my friend, in what manner does tyranny arise? -- that it has a democratic origin is evident. [Plato: The Republic, VIII]
Plato held that a society ruled by "democratic men" -- that is, men who neglect to honor virtue, or to distinguish between clean and unclean desires -- is in danger of degenerating into tyranny. The descent into tyranny is driven by a collection of people Plato calls drones, defined generally as those who do no useful work. The name "drone" is taken from the entomological term for male bees and ants -- who, even in Plato's time, were known to live off of the work of others in their hive, contributing nothing except to reproduce themselves.
Plato's "drones" are a rather curious coalition. He writes that there are two broad sorts: drone followers and drone leaders, which he metaphorically refers to as crawling drones and flying drones. The crawling drones, or drone followers, consist of career criminals and the non-working poor. The flying drones, or drone leaders, are elected officials and government bureaucrats who garner power by catering to the constituency formed by the crawling drones.
May we not say that this is the drone in the house who is like the drone in the honeycomb, and that the one is the plague of the city as the other is of the hive? ...And God has made the flying drones [drone leaders], all without stings, whereas of the walking drones he has made some without stings. but others have dreadful stings; of the stingless class are those who in their old age end as paupers; of the stingers come all the criminal class, as they are termed.
-- The Republic, Book VIII
The descent into tyranny begins the decline of patriarchy within the home.
I mean that the father grows accustomed to descend to the level of his sons and to fear them, and the son is on a level with his father, he having no respect or reverence for either of his parents; and this is his freedom.
--The Republic, Book VIII
Foreigners and resident aliens are treated like citizens:
metic [resident alien] is equal with the citizen and the citizen with the metic, and the stranger is quite as good as either.
--The Republic, Book VIII
Children grow entitled and arrogant, and adults cater to them for fear of being labelled as authoritarians. Everyone wants to be the "cool parent" or the "cool teacher".
In such a state of society the master fears and flatters his students, and the students despise their masters and tutors; young and old are all alike; and the young man is on a level with the old, and is ready to compete with him in word or deed; and old men condescend to the young and are full of pleasantry and gaiety; they are loth to be thought morose and authoritative, and therefore they adopt the manners of the young.
-- The Republic, Book VIII
The decaying society embraces a spirit of sexual liberation and sexual equality.
Nor must I forget to tell [in a democracy] of the liberty and equality of the two sexes in relation to each other. Strange as this practice may seem to us today, this was indeed the policy of some Greek city-states in and around the time of Plato.
-- The Republic, Book VIII
Plato wrote that as the drones grow more numerous, the more ambitious drones begin to occupy positions of power and influence. Meanwhile, their less capable constituents form mobs to shout down speakers and suppress the political speech of those who disagree with them:
In a democracy, they [drones] are almost the entire ruling power, and while the keener sort 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; hence in democracies almost everything is managed by the drones.
-- The Republic, Book VIII
There are some members of society who have retained the virtues of the previous generation, such as diligence and temperance. Theses people naturally prosper, but the drones elect leaders who confiscate their wealth and redistribute it:
*Then there is another class which is always being severed from the mass...They are the orderly class, which in a nation of traders sure to be the richest. They are the most squeezable persons and yield the largest amount of honey to the drones... And this is called the wealthy class, and the drones feed upon them... *
And do they not share? Do not their leaders deprive the rich of their estates and distribute them among the people?
-- The Republic, Book VIII
The drones use bureaucratic and criminal indictments to harass and immobilize their political opponents:
Then come impeachments and judgments and trials of one another... The people have always some champion whom they set over them and nurse into greatness.
-- The Republic, Book VIII
The redistribution of wealth continues, including the cancellation of debts:
At first, in the early days of his power, he is full of smiles, and he salutes every one whom he meets, ... liberating debtors, and distributing land to the people and his followers, and wanting to be so kind and good to every one!
-- The Republic, Book VIII
The drones elect a leader who drums up national emergencies as a pretext for expanding the power of government. In Plato’s narrative, the emergency is a war — but a war on poverty, or a war on drugs, or a global pandemic would also do the trick.
He [the tyrant elected by the drones] is always stirring up some war or other, in order that the people may require a leader.
-- The Republic, Book VIII
To enlarge his constituency, the drone-leaders open the borders and encourage the immigration of more drones from foreign countries:
And who are the devoted band, and where will he procure them? They will flock to him, he said, of their own accord, if lie pays them. By the dog! I said, here are more drones, of every sort and from every land.
-- The Republic, Book VIII
In the last stages of social and political decay, corruption spirals out of control. Having plundered the wealth of the upper classes, the tyrant begins to confiscate the property of the working class and underclass that elected him, but now they cannot remove him from power. Plato likens the tyrant to a son who steals from the father who has raised him:
In so far as the fortunes of attainted [accused] persons may suffice, he will be able to diminish the taxes which he would otherwise have to impose upon the people. And when these fail? ... then he and his boon companions, whether male or female, will be maintained out of his father's estate.... By heaven, he said, then the parent will discover what a monster he has been fostering in his bosom; and, when he wants to drive him out, he will find that he is weak and his son strong.
-- The Republic, Book VIII
Finally, the tyrant turns violently on its own citizens, drones and all, after depriving them of the right to bear arms:
Glaucon: Why, you do not mean to say that the tyrant will use violence? What! beat his father if he opposes him?
Socrates: Yes, he will, having first disarmed him. Then he is a parricide, and a cruel guardian of an aged parent; and this is real tyranny, about which there can be no longer a mistake.
--The Republic, Book VIII
Conclusion
It may be worth mentioning how I came to be acquainted with Plato's account of dēmokratía and the descent into tyranny. I first learned of it in listening to a lecture by Hillsdale College historian Paul Rahe. The lecture was on Plato's Republic for its own sake; Rahe did not make any analogy between Plato's narrative and current day politics, and am not sure whether he intended to. Nevertheless, the analogy was clear to me, and I found it so uncanny that I was incredulous. To be frank, I was pretty sure that Rahe was cherry picking passages from a long text to make it look as though Plato was writing about contemporary politics. So, I read Plato's Republic for myself. In doing so, I found that, contrary to my expectations, Rahe was simply summarizing a section of Book VIII -- and that, if anything, he had undersold the similarity between Plato's "democratic man" and the modern left. I would not insist that you take my word for that, and I do not even believe it would be rational to take my word for it on the basis of the snippets quoted in this essay (for all you know, if you haven't read the text, I am doing what I suspected Rahe of doing). Thus, I invite the reader to examine the relevant sections of Plato's Republic for themselves. The entirety of Book VIII can be read in about an hour, or in two hours for a slow reader like me.
When he spoke of tyranny, Plato was speaking from experience, both personal and collective. At the time he wrote The Republic around 375 BC, Plato's home city of Athens had suffered through four different tyrannical regimes over a two-hundred year period -- including the reign of the so-called "Thirty Tyrants", which Plato himself lived though as a young man, and during which approximately five percent of the population of Athens was murdered by its own government. Summarizing the history of the era, Alexander Hamilton would later write,
It is impossible to read the history of the petty Republics of Greece and Italy, without feeling sensations of horror and disgust at the distractions with which they were continually agitated, and at the rapid succession of revolutions by which they were kept in a state of perpetual vibration between the extremes of tyranny and anarchy. [Hamilton: Federalist #9]
So in The Republic, Plato was not speculating about something distant from his experience. On the contrary, like the "Ghost of Christmases Yet to Come" in Dickens's Christmas Carol, Plato had been where we might be going, and hoped to warn us so that we would be less likely to go there. Plato clearly has a low opinion of the "democratic men" of his own time, and was probably on the other side from them of whatever political aisle ran through Athens at the time. Maybe they were right and he was wrong. But right or wrong, this faction must have existed, more or less as Plato describes them. If Plato made them up out of thin air, then he was not only a philosopher, but a prophet.
Grandmother, What Big Teeth You Have!
Part 1: Identity Politics and the Russian Revolution
1. Introduction
As of this writing, the Oxford English Dictionary defines wokeness as being alert to injustice and discrimination in society, especially racism. The Oxford definition doesn't mention radical progressivism, censorship, collective punishment, or selective enforcement of criminal laws -- or, indeed, 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).
To be woke, by the woke definition of wokeness, is to be a noble thing indeed: a defender of the oppressed and downtrodden. This is the ethos of a fairy tale hero like Robin Hood, or Prince Charming, or the valiant huntsman who vanquishes the big bad wolf and saves Little Red Riding Hood and her sick, old grandma. Not coincidentally, it has also been the stated agenda of every mass murdering tyrant in modern history.
The propaganda of Soviet communism was rife with woke sounding platitudes. For example,
- Real liberty can exist only where exploitation has been abolished, where there is no oppression of some by others. [Stalin: Interview with Roy Howard, 1936]
- The Social Democrats' ideal should [be] the tribune of the people, which 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. [Lenin (1902): What is to be Done?]
- They [blacks] have the full right to self-determination when they so desire and we will support and defend them with all the means at our disposal in the conquest of this right, the same as we defend all oppressed peoples. [Trotsky (1933): The Negro Question in America]
The problem is that Soviet communism did not really accomplish any of those things. What it did accomplish was to murder some 20 million people [source], and to terrorize hundreds of millions more over multiple generations. The people of the Russian empire, including many of the soon-to-be victims of Soviet terror, for the most part did not see this coming. As Aleksander Solzhenitsyn wrote,
If the intellectuals in the plays of Chekhov who spent all their time guessing what would happen in twenty, thirty, or forty years had been told that in forty years interrogation by torture would be practiced in Russia; that prisoners would have their skulls squeezed within iron rings; that a human being would be lowered into an acid bath; that they would be trussed up naked to be bitten by ants and bedbugs; that a ramrod heated over a primus stove would be thrust up their anal canal (the "secret brand"); that a man's genitals would be slowly crushed beneath the toe of a jackboot; and that, in the luckiest possible circumstances, prisoners would be tortured by being kept from sleeping for a week, by thirst, and by being beaten to a bloody pulp, not one of Chekhov's plays would have gotten to its end because all the heroes would have gone off to insane asylums. [The Gulag Archipelago]
Now I invite you to consider the scenes Solzhenitsyn describes above, imagine them as vividly as you can, and multiply by 20 million. Next, imagine the continuous, lifelong fear that you could be next no matter what you do, and that you will be next if you say publicly certain things that you know to be true; multiply that by 300 million (over three generations), and add to the total. If you can get your head around that quantity of human suffering and loss, then you have grasped the magnitude of the evil of Soviet Communism.
As merciless and malevolent as Soviet communism was, how could the Russian people, especially the intelligentsia, have failed to apprehend its true nature until it was too late? First, the Bolshevik revolutionaries didn't say they were gathering strength to mount a campaign of murder and oppression; quite the opposite! Who could be against their stated agenda of fighting tyranny no matter what class of the people it affects? or self-determination for historically marginalized peoples? or abolishing oppression of some by others? One of the lessons of the Russian Revolution -- along with the histories of Naziism and of Chinese communism which followed later in the same century -- is that when the leaders of a political movement expound the lofty mission of defending the downtrodden and looking out for the little guy, that may not be what they are actually up to. Often, indeed, they are up to the very opposite, and it is not always easy to tell.
On the other hand, it is not outright impossible to tell. Tyrannical movements may wear sheep's clothing, but they cannot hide their fangs. Hallmarks of tyranny, which are often visible even in the early stages of tyrannical movements, include identity politics, censorship, thuggery, and authoritarianism. Soviet communism exhibited these hallmarks from its beginnings, as did the Naziism in Germany and communism in China. This essay will discuss the visible role of identity politics in the early stages of the communist movement in Russia.
2. Identity Politics in Soviet Russia
Grandmother, what big teeth you have! [Little Red Riding Hood]
The chief intellectual and political leader of the Russian communist revolution was a one Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, better known today as Vladimir Lenin. Like the thinker Karl Marx before him, the doer Lenin often spoke in terms of "class enemies": not individuals who had exploited other individuals, but kinds of people who had historically exploited other kinds of people. For example, in 1905, closely following the fashion of Marx, Lenin wrote:
Present-day society is wholly based on the exploitation of the vast masses of the working class by a tiny minority of the population, the class of the landowners and that of the capitalists. [Lenin (1905): Socialism and Religion]
For Lenin and the Bolshevik party he led, the exploiting class, namely the bourgeoisie, consisted of (1) the aristocracy, (2) kulaks (farmers who owned at least 8 acres of land), (3) industrialists, and (4) ideological enemies -- meaning basically any white-collar worker who was not a communist. Anyone denounced as falling into one of these four categories would eventually be marked for persecution and often death in the USSR, regardless of their personal history as an alleged exploiter.
It is true that working class Russians of Lenin's time often lived in grinding poverty, and that many aristocrats and industrialists enriched themselves at the expense of that working class, and that these same aristocrats and industrialists often exhibited depraved indifference to the wellbeing of their fellow men. At the same time, it is also true that not all landowners and industrialists were equally exploitative, and that some dealt more honestly and charitably with their fellow men than most workers would have done in the same shoes. Moreover, it is also true, especially of the kulaks (successful peasant farmers), that many earned their way, partly or wholly, into their positions of relative wealth by their own diligence and foresight. But the communist picture of the world washes over the whole story of individual difference in merit, conduct, or culpability. Lenin's narrative of class struggle conveniently drew a circle around everyone who owned land or other valuables, labeling them as "parasites" and "class exploiters". This in turn licensed the indiscriminate looting and confiscation of those valuables -- first by rioting thugs and later by the communist government -- not only with a clear conscience, but with a pretext of righteous indignation. So one signal that was missed by the Russian intelligentsia was this: when an ideology labels a group of people wholesale as historical class exploiters -- be it the Jews, the Tootsies, the bourgeoisie, straight white men, or any other group -- this telegraphs a predatory intent toward that group, which may remain largely hidden unless and until the predators gather enough strength to act on it.
In 1916, just before coming to power, Lenin's tone was confrontational, but not as overtly malicious as it would later become. On the eve of his successful coup d'etat, Lenin wrote that violence would probably be necessary to bring about the revolution, but that it might not, and that in some sense he hoped it would not:
Peaceful surrender of power by the bourgeoisie is possible, if it is convinced that resistance is hopeless and if it prefers to save its skin. It is much more likely, of course, that even in small states socialism will not be achieved without civil war, and for that reason the only program of international Social-Democracy must be recognition of civil war, though violence is, of course, alien to our ideals. [Lenin (1916): A Caricature of Marxism and Imperialist Economism]
In hindsight the last clause (violence is alien to our ideals) was a complete lie. Within two months of assuming to power, Lenin was taking a far more menacing tone:
No mercy for these enemies of the people, the enemies of socialism, the enemies of the working people! War to the death against the rich and their hangers-on, the bourgeois intellectuals; war on the rogues, the idlers and the rowdies! All of them are of the same brood—the spawn of capitalism. [Lenin (1917): How to Organize Competition]
We now know that Lenin's talk of war and death was not just talk. After seizing control of the government, the Bolsheviks instituted the Cheka, the first incarnation of the Soviet secret police. The immediate business of the Cheka was to carry out the Red Terror, which would take the lives of tens of thousands of allegedly "bourgeois" Russian civilians. This terror campaign was consciously named and patterned after the infamous Reign of Terror that had followed the French Revolution in the late 18'th century.
As important as the extermination (Lenin's word) of class enemies, another job of the Cheka was to systematically confiscate the belongings of all "enemies of the people" -- where an enemy of the people, again, was anyone with enough property to be worth stealing. There were some obstacles to achieving this objective: gold, jewels, and works of art, and other valuables could be carefully hidden, and it often were. Indeed, the stories of men, women, and children desperately hiding themselves and anything of owned of value is one of the most poignant chapters in the story of the revolution. But the Cheka soon found a solution to that problem, which became part of their standard playbook: (1) kidnap a member of the bourgeois offender's family, and then (2) collect whatever payment the family could come up with, or kill the captive, or both. Thousands of the deaths in the Red Terror were the results of this scheme.
Martin Latsis, one of the men appointed to oversee the Cheka, wrote explicitly of the role of identity politics in the Red Terror:
We are not fighting against single individuals. We are exterminating the bourgeoisie as a class. Do not look in materials you have gathered for evidence that a suspect acted or spoke against the Soviet authorities. The first question you should ask him is what class he belongs to, what is his origin, education, profession. These questions should determine his fate. This is the essence of the Red Terror. [Latsis (1918), Red Terror, no 1]
Publicly, Lenin stated that Latsis's methods were excessive and that he talked too much about collective punishment -- but in hindsignt it seems that Lenin simply didn't want the quiet part said out loud. Lenin never removed Latsis from his position -- and Latsis's views, as reflected in the quotation above, essentially governed the tactics of the Cheka under Lenin's command. The Red Terror was the first modern experiment in social justice -- carried out under the same pretext embraced by the contemporary social justice movement (historical class exploitation), and with indiscriminate cruelty that was scarcely hinted at before the fact.
NelsonRushton
11mo ago
The bigoted opinion most supported by this farce of a fight isn't anything about Khelif's genital arrangement or chromosomes,
A woman, born female in a country where homosexuality and gender transition are illegal, raised as a woman, but born tall and with a face and body that is undeniably a bit masculine
According to NBC among other sources, Khelif has male (XY) chromosomes: https://www.nbcnews.com/nbc-out/out-news/imane-khelif-boxing-win-olympics-gender-eligibility-rcna164662
In my book that is obviously, by far, the central issue.
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.
Past peak woke? Don't count on it
(c) J. Nelson Rushton. Jan 20, 2025.
1. The culture war
In December 2021, engineer-entrepreneur Elon Musk made the following enigmatic tweet: "traceroute woke_mind_virus". The term "traceroute" is an inside joke for fellow computer geeks; basically, it is a request for information about where something came from and how it got here. The phrase "woke mind virus" refers to the woke movement, aka social justice movement, aka political correctness. I define wokeness -- or, as Tom Klingenstein has called it, woke communism -- as an ideology incorporating the following elements:
- victim identity politics: a caste system based on historical class grievances
- authoritarianism: a feeling of being entitled to control other people, which naturally leads to censorship, militance, lawlessness, and arbitrary, oppressive governance
- radical progressivism: extreme disregard for traditional norms and values
America, and, with it, all of Western civilization, is now embroiled in a culture war. This war is often portrayed as left vs. right; indeed, pundits on both sides of the corporate media make their living peddling the left vs. right drama in the style of a pro-wrestling production. But the reality is that, in a sane world, conservatives and progressives are not natural enemies. They are people of different temperaments, who tend to have different blind spots, and therefore tend to make different sorts of mistakes -- and who need each other's input to see into those blind spots and to temper those mistakes. Of course, conservatives and progressives often hold different opinions about how to achieve their common objectives, but that is not what makes people enemies. My wife and I often hold different opinions about how to achieve our common objectives, but that certainly doesn't make us enemies. At the end of the day it makes us a better team, when we can put our egos aside and work together.
In the long run, the real culture war is a war against fundamentalism -- aka radicalism, extremism, or supremacy movements. As Solzhenitsyn wrote, the line between good and evil is not a line between nations, classes, or political parties, but a line that passes through every human heart. Fundamentalists are people who have worked themselves into a sustained frenzy, in which they've redrawn the line between good and evil to lie between their people and certain other people. Fundamentalism, thus defined, has two broad consequences. First, because fundamentalists vest ultimate moral authority in people rather than principles, they tend to actually abandon the precepts of the ideology from which their sect sprang up. For example, the woke movement has abandoned liberal principles like free speech and equal treatment under law -- just as Christian fundamentalists often abandon Biblical principles like grace, charity, and loving their enemies. Second, fundamentalists often feel entitled to suppress the speech of their ideological adversaries -- the bad people -- as well as to forcibly control their behavior, seize their property, and target them for oppression of any sort they can get away with. These oppressive sanctions are administered by the fundamentalist regime, not as punishment for any crime the target has committed as an individual, but simply for being a member of the targeted class -- whether that class consists of the Jews, the "bourgeoisie", the Tutsis, infidels and heretics, straight white males, or the unvaccinated.
Any ideology or identity -- from progressivism, to conservatism, to Islam, to Christianity, to being black, to being white, to being German, etc. -- can spawn a degenerate, fundamentalist strain. Wokeness is such a degenerate strain. Wokeness is not progressivism, or even "extreme" progressivism, and it is certainly not liberalism. Essentially, wokeness is a fundamentalist leftist cult masking itself as compassionate progressivism. Wokeness is not too much of a good thing, or even too much of a decent thing; it is a warlike tyranny that has infected the progressive political parties of the West and begun to transform them into something unrecognizable to their well-meaning forebears.
Unfortunately, many progressives today have cozied up to the woke vampire, holding their tongues about its obvious dark tendencies for the sake of forming a political coalition. I assume they believe this is a price worth paying to accomplish otherwise laudable aims, and that the insanity can only go so far. I believe they are woefully mistaken.
2. The (probably growing) danger of woke communism
It is human nature to assume that our children's future, and their children's future, will be fundamentally like the past we grew up with -- even when we have good reasons to believe otherwise. For example, it would have seemed alarmist to most Russians in 1900 to talk of omnipresent secret police, mass torture, and death camps on the horizon in their country. Yet, these developments, though they may have seemed far-fetched at the time, were in fact less than twenty years away under the grip of the Bolshevik communist ideology -- which at the time appeared to be nothing more than a fringe movement. As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn would later write,
If the intellectuals in the plays of Chekhov who spent all their time guessing what would happen in twenty, thirty, or forty years had been told that in forty years interrogation by torture would be practiced in Russia; that prisoners would have their skulls squeezed within iron rings; that a human being would be lowered into an acid bath; that they would be trussed up naked to be bitten by ants and bedbugs; that a ramrod heated over a primus stove would be thrust up their anal canal (the "secret brand"); that a man's genitals would be slowly crushed beneath the toe of a jackboot; and that, in the luckiest possible circumstances, prisoners would be tortured by being kept from sleeping for a week, by thirst, and by being beaten to a bloody pulp, not one of Chekhov's plays would have gotten to its end because all the heroes would have gone off to insane asylums.
-- Solzhenitsyn (1973): The Gulag Archipelago
I believe that wokeness represents a grave and growing threat to Western civilization. I am not saying that we are going to have death camps in the United States in a generation or two. I am saying that, if we continue down the path we have been on, America's future is going to be considerably less safe, less comfortable, and less free than its past, as a result of the influence of woke communism.
Since the victory of Donald Trump in the 2024 US Presidential election, there is speculation that the worst of wokeness might now be behind us. History suggests otherwise. Tyrannical ideologies often endure political setbacks, even seemingly crippling setbacks, only to later reemerge with renewed strength. Soviet communism seemed all but dead when its leaders were exiled in the 1890's. Nazism took a direct hit when an attempted Nazi coup d'etat was thwarted in 1923 and the party leader, Adolf Hitler, was sentenced to prison. Shia fundamentalism ebbed for a time in Iran when its leader, Ruhollah Khomeini, was exiled in 1964. But each of these movements came back with renewed strength within a generation -- because the culture was invisibly moving in a direction that was susceptible to their influence, even while their leaders were temporarily out of the picture.
Most Americans are not actively advancing the woke agenda. In 2018, around eighty percent of Americans, including a majority of Democratic voters, affirmed the statement that "political correctness has gone too far" [source]. But this matters less than it might appear. The vast majority of Russians were not communists in 1917, and most probably thought communism had gone too far, when the October Revolution swept away democratic governance in Russia. Most Germans were not Nazis in 1933, when Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany, and most never became Nazis -- but World War II and the Holocaust happened all the same. Most Iranians were not Islamic extremists in 1979 when the Ayatollah came to power in the Iranian revolution. Only 2% of Vietnamese are members of the communist party today -- and yet the party rules that country with an iron fist. Tyranny grows from the seeds of a militant and vocal minority, in the soil of a fearful and silent majority. As long as the majority remains fearful and silent, it is naive to expect a tyrannical ideology to fade away just because its leaders have been removed from power for a time.
Though its devoted constituents were a minority of the population, the hydra of political correctness -- or social-justice, or wokeness, or whatever you want to call it -- got its way more and more in the period from 1990 to 2020. For a thumbnail sketch of the cultural shift that occurred over that period, consider the following public statements by leading American politicians in 1987, 2012, and 2020:
Behind me stands a wall that encircles the free sectors of this city, part of a vast system of barriers that divides the entire continent of Europe. . . . Standing before the Brandenburg Gate, every man is a German, separated from his fellow men. Every man is a Berliner, forced to look upon a scar. . . . As long as this gate is closed, as long as this scar of a wall is permitted to stand, it is not the German question alone that remains open, but the question of freedom for all mankind. . . .General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization, come here to this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!
-- Ronald Reagan: address at the Brandenburg Gate; June 12, 1987
If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges; if you've got a business, you didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen.
-- Barack Obama: Campaign speech at Roanoke, VA, July 13, 2012.
Defund the police, the issue behind it is that we need to reimagine how we are creating safety. And when you have many cities that have one third of their entire city budget focused on policing, we know that is not the smart way, and the best way, or the right way to achieve safety. This whole movement is about rightly saying, we need to take a look at these budgets and figure out whether it reflects the right priorities. For too long, the status quo thinking has been that you get more safety by putting more cops on the street. Well, that's wrong.
-- Kamala Harris: radio interview, June 2020.
Each of the last two statements might have been considered unthinkable for a national leader in America just a generation before it was made. Yet, wokeness kept gaining ground over the American mind -- even while most Americans believed it had already gone too far. And, of course, the cultural shift toward woke insanity was not just talk. As Richard Weaver famously wrote, ideas have consequences -- and crazy ideas have crazy consequences. If you once believed, as I did, that woke bureaucrats would never allow DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) to override meritocracy in safety-critical professions such as those of physician and airline pilot, you'd have been wrong. If you once thought they would never defund and demoralize the police to let criminals rampage against law-abiding citizens in broad daylight, you'd have been wrong again. If you once thought they wouldn't open the Southern border of the United States to invite millions upon millions of illegal aliens into the country with no immigration enforcement whatsoever, you'd have been wrong again. If you once thought they would never push aggressively for biological males to compete in women's sports, or house male sex offenders in women's prisons because the convicts claim to have gender dysphoria, you'd have been wrong again. If you once thought they would never arrest hundreds of people each year in a Western democracy [the UK] for political speech posted on social media, you'd have been wrong again. If you once thought they would never advocate rationing lifesaving medicine based on race (whites to the back of the line), you'd be wrong yet again. If you thought they would never let immigrant gangs rape tens of thousands of young girls, while police deliberately ignored the situation on the grounds that it would be "Islamophobic" to intervene, you'd have been wrong yet again. As Sam Harris has asked, if we will allow our daughters to be raped in the name of diversity and inclusion, what won't we allow? And if the rapists' woke government benefactors give them high cover for their crimes, what won't they do if we allow them? Can you look in the mirror and say out loud what you still think they'll never be willing to do? or what they will never be able to get away with -- even if most people know it's wrong, and secretly, silently oppose it?
Since the election of Donald Trump, there have been some encouraging signs in the struggle against woke communism. Several advertisers have come back to Twitter/X, who had previously boycotted the platform because it refused to censor what they call "hate speech" (broadly defined to include a great deal of right-leaning political speech). Many corporations, including Facebook/Meta, McDonalds, and Harley Davidson, have dismantled their DEI (diversity-equity-inclusion) programs, and so have several universities. Even Alexandria Ocasio Cortez has removed her pronouns (she/her) from her Twitter bio! But recall -- or be informed, if you are not old enough to remember -- that when Ronald Reagan left office in 1988, no advertisers were boycotting anyone for refusing to censor anything; few if any corporations or universities had active DEI departments, and no one of either party had pronouns in their bio. Yet, somehow, in thirty years or so we got from "Tear down this wall" [Reagan, 1987] to "You didn't build that" [Obama, 2012], to "Defund the police" [Kamala Harris, 2020]. On a crazy-scale from 1 to 10, if we seemed to be at 3 in 1987, and a 7 in 2020, we have perhaps now clawed our way back to a 5 or 6. And if long term momentum was in the wrong direction in 1988, after eight years of Reagan presidency, why would it be in the right direction now? In my opinion, wokeness isn't going anywhere -- at least not if our culture continues down the path of business as usual.
3. The constitution of the people
So how did we go from "tear down this wall" to "defund the Police" in just thirty years? I submit the root of the problem isn't wokeness itself, but the moral rot that gave wokeness room to breathe in the first place. Honest men and women, even honest men and women who lean left politically, do not become woke "social justice warriors", or indulge the woke's illiberal schemes in silent complicity for political or personal gain. Nor do brave men and women, of any political leaning, cower down and keep silent in the face of "cancel culture". If we had more honest men on the left like Michael Shellenberger, and more brave women on the right like Riley Gaines, we would never have been dragged into the swamp of wokeism in the first place. But we have too few, and I submit that is the heart of the problem. This condition of moral rot -- the soil in which tyranny grows -- does not change when the leaders of an extremist movement are exiled or imprisoned, let alone defeated in a single election.
In every nation, at all times, the militant, tyrannical minority is there lurking in the shadows, ready to pounce upon weakness. That is an eternal given. What matters is what the rest of us do. Tyranny requires tyrants, of course -- but, more importantly, it requires a meek and passive populace, minding its own business while the tyrant and his minions eat away at the roots of their civilization. What arrests and beats back tyranny is not a policy written on paper, but the moral character of the nation. As Thomas Paine wrote in 1776, it is wholly owing to the constitution of the people, and not to the constitution of the government, that the crown is not as oppressive in England as in Turkey [Common Sense].
Our forebears, the first Americans, left their families and farms to go to war against the greatest military power then in the world. They did this not knowing whether they would die in battle, not knowing whether they would be hanged as traitors, and often not knowing whether they would even be paid for their service. None of them were conscripted; every one was free to let someone else bear the brunt of risk and sacrifice, while fully sharing in the liberty the Revolution would bring if it was successful. The continental soldiers risked all they had -- not for their personal gain, but to defend the natural rights of their countrymen and their posterity.
Today, by contrast, many of us -- that aforementioned posterity -- will not dare to speak the plain truth before our eyes if it means we might be passed over for a promotion at work, or be made to feel socially uncomfortable. In that respect, we are not living lives worthy of the sacrifice our forebears made for us, let alone living up to the example they set. Can such a nation dodge the bullet of tyranny for long? I doubt it. That is not how the world works, or ever has worked. As economist Walter Williams noted, the freedom of individuals from compulsion or coercion never was, and is not now, the normal state of human affairs; the normal state for the ordinary person is tyranny, arbitrary control and abuse. Why should the United States be any different, if it ceases to be the home of the brave?
To be clear (since this is the Motte), the cultural shortcoming that let wokeness wedge its foot in the door is not intellectual, but moral in nature. Tyranny does not gain ground with logic, and logic is not the weapon that beats it back. The vast majority of Americans already know that wokeness is wrong. What people need to stand up against wokeness is not a higher IQ, or a seminar on rationality, but the courage to say out loud, in public, what they already know to be right. If men do not stand up and speak the truth when it is uncomfortable, it will become expensive. If we do not stand up and speak the truth when it is expensive, it will become dangerous. If we then do not stand up and speak the truth when it is dangerous, only God can help us. If we are not willing to speak the truth and we do not believe in God, we will certainly believe in Hell -- because it is coming to us.
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
1yr ago
Republicans should not concede illegal results If this is uniquely democracy-destroying, and unacceptable, then: Republicans need to cheat harder. Since in many ways (2) is worse than (1), I'm skeptical of any argument that supposes that conceding a rigged election is the healthy and adult decision.
The nuance here is that (1) we don't know if the election was rigged, and (2) that, by itself, is the problem. Every week I hear people say there is no evidence that the election was rigged. That is the wrong place to put the burden of proof. There is no evidence that the 1946 Russian elections were rigged either, but as Stalin said, "It's not who votes that matters, but who counts." The question is not whether there is evidence the election was rigged, but whether the election was conducted in such a way that there would be evidence if the election were rigged. I think the answer to that question is no -- because if it were yes, Democrats would say that and back it up instead of gaming the burden of proof a la Stalin.
Hitler's Identity Politics, Part I
(c) Feb 10, 2025, By J. Nelson Rushton
Note:
This post is an installment of a book I am writing, under the working title They See not, which I am serializing as a series of posts on The Motte. The book is planned to be about the nature and common characteristics of populist tyrannical movements, with special focus on the woke ideology, and about how to combat such movements. The first three posts in the series were:
- Introduction: Past peak Woke? Don't count on it.
- Say then, my friend... Plato on Democracy and Tyranny
- Victim Identity Politics and Wokenesss
The current chapter is entitled Hitler's Identity Politics ,Part I.
Introduction: Cargo-Cult Political Science
No one else is considered the face of modern evil like Hitler. That is peculiar, because Mao Zedong murdered far more people than Hitler did, and caused the deaths of tens of millions more through ideology-driven malfeasance. The number of Chinese civilians that were murdered and needlessly starved under Mao was probably greater than the total number of deaths in World War II and the Holocaust from all causes, on all sides, civilian and military combined [source]. Moreover, Bolshevik revolutionary leader Vladimir Lenin, the man who was Mao's practical model of success, murdered just as many as Hitler, and, unlike Hitler, founded a regime that transformed his country into Mordor for generations.
Yet a statue of Lenin, sans head, stood in the Mandalay Bay Hotel in Las Vegas for years. One stands in Seattle at the corner of 35th St. and Fremont as of this writing, and that one has the head on. It is not unusual to hear people quote the allegedly wise sayings of Mao and Lenin on their merits, even while being aware of their crimes. People say things like, As Mao Zedong said, women hold up half the sky. Joe Biden repeated this quote in 2021 in a commencement address at the US Coast Guard Academy, though he did not mention Mao. It also once happened that Trump unknowingly quoted Adolf Hitler, and you can compare the news coverage of those two events by looking at the results of this google search in terms of news coverage compared to this one.
While I believe that Mao was a man consumed by evil, I also believe that when Mao said women hold up half the sky, he identified an important truth and put it in a memorable and persuasive way. Is it OK to quote Mao on that, on the merits of the saying, in spite of the fact that he killed tens of millions of people? Some think it is and some think it isn't, and I honestly I don't know. But I do know that nobody (outside of a skinhead rally) begins a paragraph with "As Adolf Hitler said, ...". That is even though Hitler was a more cogent writer and speaker than Mao -- and, like Mao, or Lenin, or any other tyrant, some of what Hitler said had merit. Even a blind, evil pig finds an acorn once in a while. I also know that there aren't any statues of Hitler in Las Vegas or Seattle, with or without the head -- and no one would put one up because it would make them a social and economic pariah. So why is Hitler completely demonized, in a way that Lenin and Mao are not?
I submit there is a great deal of cargo-cult science surrounding Hitler. The phrase cargo cult science comes from Richard Feynman's 1974 Caltech commencement address, where he related the following story:
In the South Seas there is a "cargo cult" of people. During the war, they saw airplanes land with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they've arranged to imitate things like runways, to put fires [like landing lights] along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut [like a control tower] for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head like headphones, and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas. He's the controller, and they wait for the airplanes to land.
The moral of Feynman's story is that when you look at something to see what makes it tick, the features that matter are not always the ones that meet the eye most easily.
For example, in the broadest strokes, Hitler was a far-right national socialist. Many people hold that since Hitler was "far right", the more right-wing you are, the more like Hitler you must be. And many hold that, since Hitler was a nationalist, the more nationalist you are, the more like Hitler you must be. But, for some reason, vanishingly few people hold that the more socialist you are, the more like Hitler you must be -- even though, if one actually reads the Nazi platform, it has about as much for Bernie Sanders to love as it has for John Birch. But at the end of the day, saying that Hitler was essentially defined by his right-wingism, or his nationalism, or his socialism, just because he was a right wing national socialist, is no more logical per se than saying that what defined him was his distinctive style of moustache. Accepting any of these uncritically, from the nationalism to the socialism to the funny little moustache, is what Feynman would call cargo cult (political) science.
Beyond the question of what made Hitler and his ideology so evil, there is widespread uncritical acceptance of the proposition that Hitler was evil in the first place -- even radioactively evil, in a way that even Lenin, Stalin, and Mao Zedong are not, though the latter were more prolific mass murders. As a kid growing up in America in the 70's and 80's, I naturally accepted that Hitler was evil. It did not have to be explained to me in any detail what made Hitler count as being evil; duh, he started World War II and murdered six million Jews. Of course anyone who launches a war of conquest is pure evil. Like Hitler. Or James K. Polk. No, wait a minute; that can't be right. But of course anyone and orchestrates a genocide is evil. Like Hitler. Or Moses. No, wait a minute; that's not right either. Weights and weights, measures and measures.
Branding Hitler as evil without being able to cogently say why is dangerous for two reasons. First, it makes it more likely that we might be following in his footsteps without realizing it. Second, it increases the risk that our children will reject our assessment of Hitler when they see that we have made up our minds for no good reason -- and that could make them more vulnerable to jumping on the bandwagon if another Hitler comes along, especially a Hitler in sheep's clothing. For both of those reasons, it is important to understand what made Hitler Hitler in deeper than cargo-cult fashion, so that we can better recognize whatever that thing is in other contexts -- most importantly within our own hearts. Or do you believe that, whatever made Hitler Hitler, it can't happen here, or that you have none of it in you?
I will argue that what makes Hitler literally Hitler, first and foremost, was not his nationalism, or his socialism, or his right-wingism, or his wars of aggression, or even his penchant for genocide, but his identity politics. I define identity politics as the embrace of a caste system with different moral standards for different groups, based on demographic characteristics such as race, religion, and ethnicity. Hitler practiced identity politics of two substantively different forms: one form to rationalize his wars of aggression (primarily against Slavs), and another to rationalize his attempted genocide of the Jews. These will be discussed in the following sections.
Pagan Views of the International Order
Not everyone who launches wars of aggression, even copious wars of aggression, is trading in identity politics. Consider, for example, the opening lines of the Anglo Saxon epic Beowulf:
Lo! The Spear-Danes in days gone by
And the kings who ruled them had courage and greatness.
We have heard of those princes’ heroic campaigns.
There was Shield Sheafson, scourge of many tribes,
A wrecker of mead-benches, rampaging among foes.
This terror of the hall-troops had come far.
A foundling to start with, he would flourish later on
As his powers waxed and his worth was proved.
In the end each clan on the outlying coasts
Beyond the whale-road had to yield to him
And begin to pay tribute. That was one good king!
Note that in the Saxon mind, Shield Sheafson was "one good king". Why? Because he drove men in terror, not from their trenches, not from their fortresses, but from their bar stools, where they had presumably been minding their own business before he showed up -- and because he did this far and wide, making war on and subjugating, not one, not two, but every neighboring tribe, and exacting tribute from them like a schoolyard bully on an indefinite basis.
Note also what these lines do not say about Shield. They do not say that he settled some ancient score, or imposed cosmic justice on his tribe's historical exploiters, or even that the clans "beyond the whale road" deserved what they got because they were lesser men than the Danes. Sheafson's greatness lay in his sheer will-to-power and the macht to impose it on others. Moreover, the hero of the passage is not a member of the poet's tribe: Shield was a Dane, while the poet is a Saxon. If Shield Sheafson was a historical person, the author's ancestors may have been among his victims -- and yet the poet esteems Sheafson's mægen (greatness) impartially. Even if Shield was not a historical person, this glimpse into the Saxon mind tells us something important about them: if they glorify a Danish king for his rapacious imperialism, they certainly wouldn't need a moral pretext justify their own kings waging wars of aggression -- such as that targets had it coming because they did it to us first, or even because they were lesser men than us. The greater men they were before we whipped them, the better. Lo!
For a second example of the pagan view of warfare, consider Homer's Iliad. The Iliad tells the story of the beginning of the Trojan War. It is a tale of heroism and excellence on both sides -- but also, as much as anything, a lament for men caught in a bloody struggle whose making was beyond their control. If you had to pin the blame for the catastrophe on a single person it would be the Trojan prince Paris -- but he is more of a self-indulgent simpleton than a villain; his bumbling takes place before the story begins, and is barely deemed worth mentioning by Homer. In Homer, there are no black hats and no white hats, for individuals or for groups. Though the story was written by a Greek poet, and was a national epic of ancient Greece (comparable to a book of their Bible), it could have been written by a Trojan with much the same perspective, even if with far less craft.
Considering Beowulf and the Iliad side by side, we see that whether the story is written by the winners or the losers, there is no need in the pagan mind to cast international conflicts as matters of right and wrong, or of who is entitled to what (in stark contrast, for example, to the conflict between Israel and the Palestinian people in modern times). We should be careful not project part of our own worldview onto Homer or the Beowulf poet, and ascribe to them the belief that "might makes right". In fact, they would find that view alien. Their view of international relations is not that might makes right, but that might makes might, and right barely enters into the picture. Lo!
For a third example we will consider the Roman Republic. In 61 BC, in honor of his 45th birthday, a monument was erected to the Roman general Pompey bearing this inscription:
Pompey, the people’s general, has in three years captured fifteen hundred cities, and slain, taken, or reduced to submission twelve million human beings.
There is no indication, in the inscription or anywhere else, that Pompey was seeking vengeance or justice, or that the Goths and Gauls he subjugated, enslaved, and killed were scumbags, or even bad folks.
The Romans did think of barbarians as lesser men than themselves, but they did not feel entitled by a sense of cosmic justice to rule over them on that account. On the contrary, the Romans believed that Heaven as well as Earth existed in a Hobbesian state of nature: an amoral war of all against all, or what we might call the "law of the jungle". While the Romans believed that their own gods favored Roman victory and imperialism, they also believed that foreign gods, just as real as their own, favored their barbarian adversaries in much the same way. Thus before battle, the Romans prayed not only to their own gods, but sometimes to those of their enemies as well. The Roman prayer to the gods of their enemies was known as the evocatio, and a version of this prayer, said during the siege of Carthage, is recorded by the Roman historian Macrobius Theodosius:
I call upon the one in whose protection are the people and community of Carthage,
whether it be a god or a goddess, and upon you above all,
who have undertaken to protect this city and people,
and ask you all for your favour:
may you all desert the people and community of Carthage,
leave their sacred places, temples, and city, and depart from them ...
and come to Rome, to me and my people,
and may our sacred places, temples, city be more acceptable and approved.
The Romans did not share our modern idea of human rights. Human rights, in the modern sense, are rights granted equally to all men by natural law. The Romans had a sophisticated code of due process, but the rights of the accused -- e.g., to stand trial and cross examine witnesses before being deprived of liberty or property -- were in their view not human rights granted to all men by natural law, but Roman rights granted to Romans by the state of Rome! Acts 22 relates the following:
When they tied Paul down to lash him, Paul said to the officer standing there, “Is it legal for you to whip a Roman citizen who hasn’t even been tried?” When the officer heard this, he went to the commander and asked, “What are you doing? This man is a Roman citizen!” So the commander went over and asked Paul, “Tell me, are you a Roman citizen?” “Yes, I certainly am,” Paul replied. “I am, too,” the commander muttered, “and it cost me plenty!” Paul answered, “But I am a citizen by birth!” The soldiers who were about to interrogate Paul quickly withdrew when they heard he was a Roman citizen, and the commander was frightened because he had ordered him bound and whipped. [Acts 22:25-29, NLT]
The passage records that under Roman law, jailing and flogging a Roman citizen without a trial was strictly forbidden, and must have carried a rather grievous penalty -- but jailing and flogging a mere human being without a trial was allowed. Even if this account is not fully historical, it must have been intended to be believable to its contemporaneous audience -- which could only be the case if that was indeed the Roman policy.
In the Roman mind, when Caesar conquered Gaul, he was not violating anyone's "human rights" -- for there were no "human rights" to violate in the first place. Does this mean that the Romans were engaging in identity politics? On the contrary, it means they were not. Identity politics is not merely protecting your own people and exploiting others; it is protecting your own people, and exploiting others, and then wailing and moaning in righteous indignation when the shoe is on the other foot. Identity politics is when Ibram Kendi complains about the Atlantic Slave trade and the exploitation of Native Americans America while turning a blind eye to the vicious enslavement of a million whites by the Barbary Pirates. But hypocritical, self-righteous wailing of this sort was not the Roman way.
Consider, for example, the Roman reaction to the worst defeat in the history of the Republic, in the Battle of Cannae at the hands of Hannibal Barca. Around 60,000 Romans were killed at Cannae in a single day -- far more than the number of Americans killed in the whole of the Korean war. Additionally, between 10,000 and 20,000 Roman soldiers were taken prisoner, and Hannibal sent ten of these to Rome to plead for ransom for the rest. And what was the conversation in Rome over this event? What an affront it was to the Natural Order for Romans to be defeated by barbarians? How Rome had been stabbed in the back by traitors from within and without? How it would never have happened but for the weather? As the Roman historian Livy relates the events, no to all of that. There was resolve to continue fighting, and a somber debate over whether to ransom the hostages. The decision of the senate was to not ransom the hostages, because this would only fill Hannibal's coffers and enable and encourage further aggression. The ten Roman soldiers who had come as a delegation to Rome were sent back to Hannibal under Roman guard -- because they had given their word to return to whatever fate awaited them at the hands of the foreign general. Even the law of the jungle is a law, and fair's fair.
The Hebrew View of the International Order
The ancient Hebrews were not pagans, and their view of tribal conflict was fundamentally different from that of pagans. The Hebrews held (and still hold) that the universe has an immutable and impartial moral compass, that points in the same direction for every man and every group of men -- and that therefore, when two tribes go to war, one must be in the wrong and deserve defeat. But the Hebrews were not fundamentalists; in the scads of wars that show up in their own historical account, half of the time it was the Hebrews that were in the wrong. More than half the time, actually, by my recollection.
As an illustration of the Hebrew view, consider the book of Isaiah. The backdrop is that the Hebrews have been defeated and enslaved by the Assyrians. It is a tale of privation, defeat, and despair. Here are a few snippets from Chapter 9 [KJV translation]:
The Lord shall set up the adversaries of [Syrian king] Rezin against him, and join his [Israel's] enemies together; The Syrians before, and the Philistines behind; and they shall devour Israel with open mouth. For all this his [God's] anger is not turned away, but his hand is stretched out still.
...The Lord shall have no joy in their [Israel's] young men, neither shall have mercy on their fatherless and widows: for every one is an hypocrite and an evildoer, and every mouth speaketh folly. For all this his [God's] anger is not turned away, but his hand is stretched out still.
... Through the wrath of the Lord of hosts is the land darkened, and the people shall be as the fuel of the fire: no man shall spare his brother. And he shall snatch on the right hand, and be hungry; and he shall eat on the left hand, and they shall not be satisfied: they shall eat every man the flesh of his own arm: Manasseh, Ephraim; and Ephraim, Manasseh [tribes of Israel]: and they together shall be against Judah [in Hebrew civil war]. For all this his [God's] anger is not turned away, but his hand is stretched out still.
And why is this happening? Chapter 1 explains why, and almost every chapter thereafter reminds us: because the Jews have done wrong.
Hear, O heavens, and give ear, O earth: for the Lord hath spoken,
I have nourished and brought up children, and they have rebelled against me.
The ox knoweth his owner, and the ass his master's crib:
but Israel doth not know, my people doth not consider.
Ah sinful nation, a people laden with iniquity,
a seed of evildoers, children that are corrupters:
they have forsaken the Lord, they have provoked the Holy One of Israel unto anger,
they are gone away backward.
[Isaiah 1:3-4, KJV]
The conquest and subjugation of the Hebrews by the Assyrians was a historical event, and these verses were written by a Hebrew priest within living memory of it. Moreover, the attitude expressed in the book of Isaiah is not a one-off; it is characteristic of Hebrew culture over long periods. The books of Ezekiel and Jeremiah were written over a hundred years later, under similar circumstances of defeat and enslavement for the Hebrews, this time by the Babylonians. In all three books -- Isaiah, Ezekiel, and Jeremiah -- the Hebrews humbly accept their fate of defeat and cruel exploitation as a penalty for the error of their ways. The book of Daniel, while focusing more on a single individual captive in enemy hands, takes the same tone of humility and forbearance in defeat.
So the Hebrews teach that they are God's chosen people, but they are not chosen to rule the Earth. God does that. The Hebrews are chosen to receive God's law and proclaim it to the world, and in doing that to be held to a higher standard -- being especially blessed when they do right, but also especially cursed when they do wrong. It turns out people of every sort, Hebrew or otherwise, do wrong often enough this is no enviable bargain. As Tevye (Jewish main character in "Fiddler on the Roof") said, I know, I know, we're the chosen people. But once in a while, could You choose someone else?
Now here is a riddle for you: How is the book of Isaiah like Hitler's Mein Kampf? Answer: Both are stories of national desolation and defeat, told poignantly by one of the defeated -- and both blame the Jews. The next chapter will compare Hitler's view of the international order with the pagan view on the one hand, and the Hebrew view on the other, as well as with that of the woke movement.
Thanks for the thoughtful reply.
it may interest you that your appeal to the "courage (…) to stand up and speak the truth when it is dangerous" got me to register so I could post this reply.
Awesome! I'm flattered.
I do, as a matter of fact, believe in the objective reality of human-caused climate change and the effectiveness of most vaccines. I believe - as a non-exhaustive list, presented in no particular order - in the moral abhorrence of racism, in every human being's inalienable right to shelter and healthcare, and in the moral imperative of LGBTQ rights and acceptance.
To be frank with you, I think most of these are truisms, behind which thornier propositions are hiding. The thorny propositions mostly involve the use of violence or threats of violence against our neighbors, to compel them to behave ways that we believe are beneficial. You and I do not necessarily disagree about what is beneficial. What I suspect we disagree about is the intrinsic harm in using threats of force, including government force, against fellow human beings. For example,
- The question is not whether human-caused climate change is real, but what its future trajectory is under different scenarios, and exactly how much the government should force its citizens to do about it.
- The question is not whether most vaccines are effective, but whether people to be required by force to take particular vaccines under particular circumstances.
- The living question is not whether racism is wrong, but what to do next about it -- and in particular whether the remedy to past racism is any degree of current racism in the other direction. What exactly do you propose?
- With regard to every human being's inalienable right to shelter and healthcare, the question is not whether it would be nice for everyone to have those things, but whether that alleged right entitles me to force other people to pay for it, against their will, at the point of a (government) gun. What policy do you propose?
- The question of LGBTQ rights and acceptance, in practice, is not whether I should be allowed to infringe on their negative human rights to safety and property, or even whether it is socially acceptable ostracize someone who is gay or trans -- but whether I should be pressured, or even forced, to use the language they prefer, etc. What policy change do you propose (or what controversial status quo policy do you endorse)?
by all means feel free to simultaneously attack cancel culture and trans rights, but don't bother to claim that you're fighting wokeness as opposed to extreme progressivism.
I'm not attacking anyone at the moment. I disagree with progressivism, while I have disdain and enmity for wokeness. For example, I probably disagree with your position on "trans rights", and on most of the topics you mentioned -- but I presume you hold those positions with an eye toward the benefit of humanity at large, that you are open to changing your mind, and that you are interested in calmly listening to counterarguments. I also presume you hold those positions in good faith, and would continue to hold them even if it cost you something.
I do not make those same presumptions about people who have shown themselves to be woke authoritarians. What distinguishes them is a feeling of being entitled to be agreed with and obeyed, concomitant resistance to dialog, and a penchant for obsequious, opportunistic bandwagoning for social and material gain.
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.
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.
NelsonRushton
5mo ago
Coincidentally, I have also been thinking about communism a lot lately, namely, its impossibility, and how it is treated in public discourse. I guess I'll just add on to your thinking on it. [emphasis added]
Just two cents more on this. The most serpentine Marxists define socialism as the workers owning the means of production, without reference to state force. Alright then, what's stoppin' ya'? Surely someone could get a small business loan from Geroge Soros or somebody to start a small business -- say, a Taco Bell franchise -- that was collectively owned by the workers, and you're off to the races with your socialist experiment. Why no clamor for this from the Socialists? Not a peep?
The reason is that we know, and they know, that the truly employee-owned-and-managed Taco Bell would be almost certain to go out of business, beaten in the market by competitors owned by investors who hold the personnel accountable from the top down. It turns out that managing the means of production is a skill, that it is crucial to the success of any business, and that most cashiers and taco-makers don't have it. So... the only way that business can exist is with heavy handed, forcible intervention in the market -- say, to force all of its competitors into the same model. And then all of their suppliers (because the employee-run business can't afford market prices for stock and equipment), and all of their customers (because otherwise they buy from the lowest bidder to cut costs, which would be a top-down managed company), transitively, until you get guess what? A po-lice state.
Sure. For example, in the office my girlfriend shared with some other students, there was a map on the wall that was an equal area projection with Africa in the middle. The title was something like, "Socially Just Map of the World", and the heading under that said that usual projections of the globe onto a map "disadvantage Africa and South America, and Asia" (their words) by making them look smaller than they are by land-area comparison, and by placing them at the edge of the map, either horizontally or vertically. This level of pettiness over race was then new to me, and I chuckled and asked how anyone was "disadvantaged" by having a smaller land area on someone else's map halfway around the world. My girlfriend looked at me like I had blasphemed in front of a Bishop. She wasn't surprised that I had the thought (which was roughly as obvious to her as it was to me); she was appalled that I broke the taboo of questioning a bit of PC craziness in front of her classmates, and that she might be implicated by association ("Do you let him say things like that at home?"). This was in 1990, in the clinical psychology department at the University of Georgia, and it was the water they swam in every day.
I would emphasize that, at the time, she knew almost as well as I did that this stuff was silly, but lived in a state of ketman every day for fear of cancel culture. She gradually became more woke on the inside, though. If you think you can pretend to be something for long without becoming that thing, talk to a man who's been through a mock POW camp in SEER school (or else read "The Lucifer Effect" by Philip Zimbardo).
The leftist fundamentalists in the psych department in 1990 felt the same sense of entitlement to control other people as they probably do now, as long as they were in their element. We were going out to dinner with a group once, and one female grad student said, "If anyone orders veal, I am going to have a real problem with that." If veal had been on the menu, I'd have ordered it to find out the exact nature of the problem she was going to have -- but I suspect in my absence that would have been considered General's Orders. Another time, another girl said she had a problem with anyone who hunted. I asked if she was a vegetarian, and she said 'no', looking (1) guilty and (2) surprised, as if to say "you're not supposed to ask such things".
I only observed this directly for one semester, because my girlfriend -- who I had had a long-distance relationship with for four years of college -- broke up with me 3 months after we moved in together for grad school. There were several reasons for it, but I think one of them was that, while I was not particularly conservative at the time, my indefatigable Gomer-Pyle common sense (as I came from the math department were none of this was going on yet) was not only an embarrassment to her, but a danger to her career by way of voluntary association.
NelsonRushton
1yr ago
When it comes to prosecuting the highest-level politicians, I would use this rule of thumb: If you explained the crime in a few sentences to George Washington, would he say, "what? I don't even understand why that is a crime
Great post. I wish you would post more.
NelsonRushton
8mo ago
That is only meaningful if (a) (as jeroboam said) they are telling the truth, and (b) you compare to a control group consisting of the number of children shot in the head or chest in other war zones.
A priori, it is = easier to believe that you could find several doctors to make up this story, than it is to believe that Israeli soldiers are doing it intentionally on a regular basis. So the evidence needs to be pretty solid in my book.
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.
oops. Strike that; reverse it
I am tempted to delete the original post, but that would also delete the record of your pointing out the error. The post is now edited to preserve as much of its essential content as is still relevant, pointing out the history of the post and the correction. Thanks for the correction.
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.
First things first: the tweet is just wrong on its face, unless you would have me believe that the people who protested against racially integrated schools in 1960s America were really in the right all along (hot take if so).
Good point. Not to mention the pro slavery mobs who used to riot and destroy the buildings and printing presses of anti-slavery newspapers. There were over 100 documented cases of this in the pre-Civil-War era in the United States [source].
By the way, the pro-slavery rioters were Democrats, and Democrat politicians and police often looked the other way as it happened. That pattern continued on straight from Andrew Jackson in the 1830's to Bull Connor in Birmingham, Alabama in the 1960's. Fast forward to today: some things have changed, and some have stayed the same. Black is the new white; BLM is the new KKK, and Democrats are the new... Democrats!
I explicitly did not count famine deaths as murders, but counted them separately on top of murders. Note (with emphasis added):
caused the deaths of tens of millions more through ideology-driven malfeasance.
The number of Chinese civilians that were murdered and needlessly starved
Glad to hear you are sympathetic to the position. Unfortunately, the idea is not developed fully anywhere that I know of, but notable literature that is related to the subject includes
- "Abolition of Man", by C.S. Lewis. This is an important work, not very long , and I would start with it.
- A Conflict of Visions, by Thomas Sowell
- Maps of Meaning, by Jordan Peterson
- this video by Jordan Peterson (I have not read the book yet, and I don't care so much for the second half of the vid, but I think the first half is amazing)
- Conservatism: A Rediscovery, by Yoram Hazony (this was the book that smashed the idol of my own Enlightenment indoctrination).
- Interview with Hazony on Uncommon Knowledge about the above book.
- William F. Buckley addresses this briefly in Up From Liberalism and at length (I think) in God and Man at Yale, but I have not read those books in their entirety.
Based on the above reading, and on my thinking about it, I would formulate my position as follows. First, the Enlightenment picture of the world is that
- Fundamentally, the world consists of a bunch of little balls bouncing around in a box according to a certain set of equations, that has been here forever (or since the Big Bang), for no reason.
- All self-evident facts are clear to any rational observer (by definition of self-evident); and ideological differences arise when one or both parties make a mistake (by the rules of evidence of science) in making inferences from these facts, or else is dishonest.
- As Jefferson wrote, it is self-evident that "All men are created equal [with respect to their natural human rights], that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness...
- -- That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed."
- Our knowledge of the world grows mainly by uncovering new objectively true facts, and by making better inferences from the set of facts we have, according to the rules of evidence used in science and mathematics.
- The merit of a discourse consists in its material factuality and the strength of its objective arguments, according to the rules of evidence used in the sciences.
I would appreciate feedback on whether people think I have characterized "Enlightenments" fairly and correctly. In the meantime, here are my antitheses to these respective points, stated without evidence:
- Fundamentally, the world is a theater of war between good and evil, where the line between good and evil cuts through the center of every human heart.
- People with different ideologies start with different ways of seeing the world, or what Sowell calls different visions. In my own view, differing visions consist of (A) different conceptual vocabularies, (B) different denotations even for the concepts they share (like "racism", "justifiable homicide", "equality"), (C) different valuations of the same state of affairs, and (D) different biases (aka Bayesian priors). The elements of a vision have no truth values or truth conditions. A vision is not a set truth claims backed up by arguments; it is the stage upon which truth claims can be made and arguments can take place (like a first order structure in formal logic). There is no "neutral", or "objective" vision. Enlightenmentism itself a vision -- but those under its influence cannot easily see the water they are swimming in, or imagine how it could be rationally different. I would argue, in fact, that Enlightenmentism is a religion, and a very poor religion.
- None of this was evident to Homer, Aristotle, Genghis Kahn, Augustus Caesar, Shaka Zulu, or the Beowulf Poet. As John Selden wrote, Custom quite often wears the mask of nature, and we are taken in -- to the point that the practices adopted by nations, based solely on custom, frequently come to seem like natural and universal laws of mankind. [Natural and National Law, Book 1, Chapter 6].
- We are born with a debt to our forebears that we can never repay -- and we owe it to them to carry on their culture, values, and nation, except where there is a compelling reason to change them. Your membership in the society of your forebears does not rest on your consent. We do not have anything remotely like enough empirical evidence to objectively justify the instrumental value of our inherited concepts, values, and biases; they are a sacred heritage, a torch that has been passed to us, that we are obliged not to drop. This aspect is emphasized by Hazony.
- The role of objective reason in our cognition on important matters falls somewhere around one half of one percent (Iain Mcgilchrist's figure) of the total. Our knowledge grows in a much more important way by improving our vision of the world: cautiously refining our conceptual vocabulary and the denotation of terms within it, and acquiring new ways of seeing the world that give us different values and biases. To test this hypothesis, pick up a sample of non-academic writing on politics or ethics (e.g., that of someone who claims to be an Enlightenment thinker, like Sam Harris or Steven Pinker), and highlight every word that is used to make an analytic logical inference or a rigorous statistical argument (with, e.g., a precisely specified sample population and control group). You will probably find you have highlighted less than 1% of the text. What are they doing with the other 99% of their words? They are trying to massage the way the reader sees the world: his concepts, semantics, values, and biases. What they are doing is more like preaching a sermon than making a scientific argument. I say there is nothing wrong with that, but they would be appalled at the accusation.
- Truth, in the sense of material factuality, is indeed sacred -- but it should not be worshipped as the jealous God that the Enlightenment thinkers have taken it for. Truth is sacred only because of the common quality of excellence (Greek: Arete) that it shares with moral uprightness and artistic beauty. The exclusive sanctification of material fact and objective evidence inevitably undermines itself and leads to nihilism. This is because truthfulness must be fought for, and yet, by itself, yields no reason to fight for anything. Most people know perfectly well that wokeness is intellectually vacuous and ethically malevolent; almost no one has the courage to say so publicly. What it takes to push back against that tide is not more intelligence or better arguments, but more courage -- and Enlightenmentism has no device by which to cultivate that virtue or any other virtue. As C.S. Lewis wrote, "In battle it is not syllogisms that will keep the reluctant nerves and muscles to their post in the third hour of the bombardment" [Abolition of Man]. I am not trying to convince anyone of any matter of fact here; I am trying to convince you to grow a pair. I am not making an argument; I am preaching a sermon. So be it. With all due respect to arguments, sermons are more important.
NelsonRushton
1yr ago
That's what identity politics is. It's the belief that politics is about using the state to strengthen and benefit one's people.
I actually don't agree with this, and it is a central subject of my next planned post. The belief that politics is about "using the state to strengthen and benefit one's people" is what I would call the pagan view, but in my next post I will argue that Hitler was not a pagan. He doesn't want Germany to expand and flourish because they are his people, and he would not gracefully tolerate the same view from other tribes. Hitler wants Germany to expand, flourish, and conquer because they are the best people, in an absolute sense -- and that their flourishing and conquering at the expense of others is the only course in harmony with the one and only Natural Order.
Black lives matter, ... or so you say
Radical progressives and law enforcement
Once when I was visiting my brother-in-law in Vietnam, I noticed his six year old son had picked up a stick off the ground and was playing solder with it. The little boy pretended the stick was a pump action shotgun, pointing it at one thing after another: click-clack-BANG... click-clack-BANG. I got his attention and, with my wife as a translator, showed and told him that the correct technique is to cycle the gun while it is in recoil, before acquiring the next target: BANG-click-clack,... BANG-click-clack. He tried it a few times and then looked to me, and I gave him a smile and a thumbs-up.
A few minutes later, the boy's father (my brother-in-law) warned me not to teach him things like that -- because if he repeats them at school, his family might get an unpleasant visit from the police. I apologized for the mistake and made sure not to repeat it. A few minutes later, my brother-in-law mentioned that his motorcycle had been stolen the week before. I asked him if he had reported it to the police and he said no; they wouldn't do anything about it. In a Marxist police state, that's not what the police are for.
In the United States today, a black person is about seven times more likely to be murdered than a white person, and murder is the leading cause of death among black males under 45. The problem of a high murder rate for blacks in the US is not new, but while it has received little media attention, that rate has skyrocketed over the last ten years. The rate of homicide against blacks increased by around 50% from 2014 to 2020 and has remained near the 2020 level up to the time of this writing. This translates to about 19,000 excess black homicide deaths from 2015 to 2023, over and above what would have occurred if the 2014 rate had continued. That is more than the number of black Americans killed in World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War combined, in less time than the total duration of those three wars. Something changed in 2015 that is having the effect of a war on black people in America.
The public conversation about the epidemic of killings of blacks in America looks like something this: some researchers, such as Roland Fryer and Heather Macdonald, along with many if not most conservative thinkers on the subject, have argued that the sudden increase in the rate of black homicide is largely a result of the "Ferguson effect" -- in which police officers are reluctant to patrol and intervene in majority-black neighborhoods because of hostility toward police fomented by "Black Lives Matter" activists. Progressives, in response, say that the causal theory of the Ferguson effect is not true. If we step back and look at the debate, no matter which side one takes, what is striking is that it is generally the conservatives who begin the conversation about the problem. Homicide is the leading cause of death for black males under 45, and has increased dramatically in a short period of time -- and yet the very people who angrily shout that "Black lives matter" have little to say about the issue until they are pinned down on it by people on the other side of the political fence. What gives?
What gives, I believe, is twofold. First, Fryer and Macdonald are obviously correct: what do you expect to happen when you demoralize, and in many cases defund, the police -- and who do you expect it to happen to? Second, I submit that their silence on this issue demonstrates that woke progressives do not actually care about the safety of black people -- any more than Lenin cared about the safety of Russian proletariat. What they care about is the power-gathering narrative that white supremacy is the root of all evil. Black-on-black crime doesn't do much to advance that narrative, and so it is not of much interest to them, no matter how many black lives it takes, or how rapidly the problem grows.
But where did the ridiculous idea of abolishing the police come from in the first place? In fact, the dismantling of law enforcement by radical progressives is nothing new. In the fourth century BC, Plato described a political faction whose agenda included moral relativism, sexual liberation, open borders, treating aliens like citizens, redistribution of wealth, debt cancellation, silencing dissenting speech, the lax enforcement of criminal laws, and, finally, stripping private citizens of the right to bear arms. Sound familiar? Plato's name for this group was demokratiko ántras (Greek: democratic men), and he wrote that when a state is governed by such men, convicted criminals are free to walk the streets. He also wrote that such a state it is on the precipice of tyranny [The Republic, VIII]. In two previous Substack posts (here and here), I have written in more detail about the correspondence between Plato's narrative and the woke agenda.
The gutting of pre-existing law enforcement structures was also a common theme in the communist revolutions in both Russia and China -- though in China, the focus was on prosecutors and judges rather than police officers. I will discuss the Russian case in more detail below. In any case, it seems that going back to the time Plato, the playbook of leftist tyranny has included the following essential steps:
The secret of the "secret police" is that they are not really police at all, but a gang of thugs who operate by whatever rules they invent as they go, and whose purpose is to terrorize and silence ideological opponents of the ruling party. Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia said that on paper, the Soviet Union had a bill of rights that was better than the American bill of rights, adding "I mean it literally. It was much better" [source]. But the Soviet bill of rights didn't matter, because, in the Soviet Union, there was no de facto remedy for the violation of one's de jure rights. Indeed, a state terror organization like the Cheka or KGB cannot possibly operate alongside an organization that actually enforces the law. Thus, if it isn't really black lives that matter, but establishing a one-party police state, then abolishing the (pre-existing) police is not such a stupid idea after all. On the contrary, it is the first step in a proven plan with a long tradition!
Lenin's Abolition of the Police
Recall that in 1902 Lenin wrote,
In a previous post, I discussed how Lenin urged his followers to blame class exploitation for every problem in the world (and also, to view everything as a problem, even if it was never a problem before). In this article, I would draw the reader's attention to Lenin's description of the enemy that is to blame for all these problems, large and small: a single picture of police violence and capitalist exploitation. For Lenin, the class enemy of the bourgeoisie was intimately tied with the institutions of law enforcement.
The police forces that existed in Russia before the revolution were under the command of the Tsar, and included a repressive political police force as well as ordinary law enforcement. But in his picture of "police violence and capitalist exploitation", Lenin didn't distinguish between the two. In the Marxist view, ownership of private property was theoretically illegitimate in the first place -- and so the police's role in preventing Bolsheviks and their constituents from stealing money and other valuables that they wanted to steal (or "expropriate", as they put it) was, in their view, a form of oppression. The revolutionaries further regarded laws against assaulting whomever they wanted to assault as a form of oppression: after all their targets were capitalist bourgeoisie exploiters, or alleged to be as part of the justification of the would-be crime, and murder and theft were just what they had coming.
Lenin had advocated open war on the police for years leading up to the 1917 revolution. For example in 1905 he wrote,
Lenin knew that his regime would not be able to operate as planned alongside the existing system of courts and police. On the eve of the October 1917 revolution, he wrote,
But what would function in place the “apparatus of state power”? This would be the subject of a diabolical bait-and-switch. Before coming to power, Lenin called for abolition of the police and their replacement by a collective of armed citizens [Lenin (1917): "Tasks of the Proletariat in our Revolution"]. Lenin's followers probably imagined something along the lines of the CHAZ autonomous zone created by BLM activists in Seattle in 2020. Lenin probably laughed to himself and imagined the Cheka.
As the revolution unfolded, the Bolsheviks initially delivered on their promise to abolish the police, including both the Okhrana (Tsarist secret police) and regular law enforcement. Not only were the existing police departments wiped out as government agencies; the 1918 Soviet constitution revoked the right to vote for all former police officers -- along with other alleged class exploiters, including clergymen, former business owners, and anyone deemed "selfish or dishonorable" by the Soviet authorities:
The 1918 Soviet constitution further stipulated that "all workers be armed, and that a Socialist Red Army be organized, and the propertied class be disarmed". The collective of armed citizens was off to a good start, at least on paper, but this clause was also the beginning of gun control in the Soviet Union. In the initial phase, the Soviet government only disarmed their intended victims at the time, which consisted of people in categories designated as bourgeois.
Eventually, however, the entire civilian population would be disarmed, and the entire civilian population would also become victims or potential victims -- since anyone, at any time, might do something the authorities deemed "selfish or dishonorable" -- such as say something that the Soviet government did not want other citizens to hear, even if saying it was OK to say and hear the day before. In 1924, all private citizens, bourgeois and proletarian alike, were stripped of the right to own pistols and rifles, and private gun ownership was restricted to shotguns -- which were required to be licensed and registered, and could only be owned for the purpose of hunting. In 1939, the Soviet government confiscated all privately owned firearms. So much for a collective of armed citizens.
The wave of criminal savagery that ensued following the October 1917 revolution was beyond comprehension for most Westerners today. It is difficult to isolate the effect of Lenin's abolition of the police on this crime wave, because a civil war commenced in which atrocities including mass looting and, mass murder, and mass rape were routinely committed on both sides. However, within two months of the Bolshevik coup d'etat in October 1917, Lenin formed the Cheka -- the secret police agency of the Soviet Union that would later evolve into the KGB. So much for abolishing the police.
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