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I know that maybe is a bit OT here, but I cannot wrap my head, after seeing communists argue on /r/wikipedia (that, as the wiki itself, is full of radical leftists arguing inside) about communism.
When I think how Marxism was gladly embraced by èlites in the West, and, after the fall of the URSS, the more anglocentric progressive one that took his side, it makes me think about the type of people that embrace it.
As Zagrebbi argue here https://salafisommelier.substack.com/p/a-robin-hanson-perspective-on-the Marxism is really the Platonic Realm of wordcellery!
All arguments, apart from being factually false, are reduced not on "policy" or "government", but on words, and how to define words, how to use words in a different manner, how words can be used in different ways, how different ideologies are different because "words" says so. A typical argument goes like this: "Communism is good because, unlike Fascism or whatever else, has a good objective. The objective is good because Communism say so. Different types of Communism are born from different interpretation of Communism, who are not all good (choose here if we are talking about Stalin, Social Democracy, Left Liberalism, Anarchism, Maoism etc) because they did not adhere to the ideal definition of Communism, and everyone who does not produce a good result has secretly bad objectives or it was a Fascist all along"
Obviously I am paraphrasing an hypotetical argument of an hypotetical communist, so I am really fighting against a non-entity here. But I saw enough debates that I could crystallise it in few phrases, and understand that the marxist galaxy today has been reduced to discussions about hypoteticals and fandoms, as if it was Fanfiction.net or Archive of Our Own. Gone are the immense volumes of marxist economy or revolutionary action, in autistic dissertation on good end evil. Or maybe not, and I do not have enough knowledge of historical marxist politics, maybe they were like this all along, but I refuse to believe that communists won for decades using this kind of reasoning.
It is not surprising why Wokism had an evolutionary advantage on post-URSS marxism. All of this autism is pretty ick, it works on Reddit but not on real life, because every normal person can smell with a bullshit detector that this lines are actively trying to scam you as a North African reseller on an Italian beach. Wokism is better as an ideology because it refuses, partially, to play words. Patriarchy and Europeans are not evil because machiavellian people have tried to derail the progressive project, and our objective is to clean it arguing that, no, whoever did something bad was actively trying to sabotage the Real Meaning of Patriarchy. No, they are evil because of biology/social constructs and they deserve suffering. Autistic screeching and wordcelism do not play well with modern political coalition and the Schmittian Friend/Enemy distinction, and they also makes the women have the ick and the supporters smells like Redditors!
This seems backwards. Do you think communism just popped into existence one day, fully formed and respectable, and brainwashed the masses into thinking that their goals are good because they say so? The fundamental ethos of communism, that it is unfair for the better-born to cash in on their innate superiority (and all the more so on compound interest from the superiority of their parents), evidently resonates with many across time and place - the ancient Christians, who steamrolled over the strength-is-beauty-is-justice pagan ethos of Rome, did not need mustache-twirling wordcels in high places berating anyone on their behalf to gain followers, nor did the French Revolution with its cries for égalité.
I fully understand how cosmically unfair it seems to rightists that Hitler and Stalin can kill masses of people on the same order of magnitude but only the latter gets a pass because supposedly his end goal is the virtuous one (and you can't at all relate to this assessment of it, leading you to conclude that it must be a wordcel conspiracy), but to that I can only respond, git gud. You are supposed to be the ones who celebrate natural excellence and letting the superior prevail; why do you then kvetch when your value system loses in the marketplace of ideas? You are not going to win with an argument to the effect of "wordcels are too good with words, it is unfair that they get to push communism and win" when you are trying to argue against the very premise of your own argument.
I am not exactly sure how Stalin "gets a pass". If you asked people to list the most evil leaders in world history, there's a high chance that they'd list Hitler first and Stalin second.
One could say that Stalin "got a pass" in the way that he probably died from natural causes (unless one believes that he was poisoned) while Hitler desperately committed suicide, but that's because Stalin won a war and Hitler lost one, not due to the perceived virtue of their causes in the eyes of others.
I think that while Stalin is rightfully reviled, Hitler and his movement set a new cultural standard for evilness. Whenever we (as a culture) want to drive home the fact that something (e.g. abortion, factory farming, enforced political correctness) is maximally evil, the metaphors we reach fore are not "Stalin", "KGB", "political commissar" and "Holodomor" (a word which chromium does not even recognize), but "Hitler", "SS", "Gestapo" and "holocaust".
To be fair, the Nazis worked really tirelessly to earn the top spot on the evil assholes list. At the end, I do not think that popular culture dispassionately decided that Stalin might have killed more people, but Hitler managed a higher rate and should thus get the first prize. It was probably more that Hitler went to war with most of the Western world, so there was already a rather strong sentiment against him by the time the magnitude of his evil became common knowledge. "Turns out that the guy against whom we have been fighting one of the most bloody wars in history and who has been painted as a villain by our propaganda was actually also murdering people at a rate of a few trains a day, so if anything our propaganda painted him too flattering."
By contrast, Stalin died in 53, way before peak cold war. Subsequent propaganda focused on the USSR in general, not their dead worst leader ever. And of course there were plenty of sympathizers to downplay his atrocities.
This is an interesting phrase; it's accurate at the surface level, and also revealing in its accuracy upon scrutiny. It is more than evident that Hitler and his movement set a new cultural standard for evilness.
Cultural.
...Personally, I simply note that, by my standards, many and perhaps most people fail this particular test of humanity, and downgrade my understanding of humans and human society accordingly. The way leftists talk about fascists and fascism is, to me, a reasonably accurate working hypothesis of what most of you out there, the population in general, are really like. Maybe you can be reasoned with, or coerced. Maybe you need to have fire dropped on your cities in industrial quantities. Time will tell, and we all have it coming in the end.
Nah. Not just the cruelty, but the complicity, was the point. Clinical and targeted actions by a minority would be counter-revolutionary.
Part of revolutionary terror theory is that it's not just about killing the individuals, but destroying the society they were a part of in a way that it cannot come back from. You secure the revolution by preventing counter-revolution, and you can prevent the counter-revolution by making would-be counter-revolutionaries complicit in the revolution, so that its loss would lose them.
Part of that, in turn, was encouraging/pressuring/coercing other members of society into complicity. In more 'civilized' / stable communist societies, this entailed the use of domestic surveillance states where people spied on friends/family/other breaks of social trust that- if revealed- would ruin their ability to operate outside of the state. In revolutionary terror periods, more direct violence, often mob violence, is the way to build complicity on the perpetrators. People who partake in public violence/torture/etc. with the sanction of the state against public enemies are not only unlikely to turn against the state, but are also more likely to rationalize that what the state does is morally justified and not worth bringing to just account, for what the state did was what they did and people tend to rather rationalize their actions than want to confess and condemn themselves.
Both extremes- 'mere' surveillance state participation or revolutionary terror- work on the same principle of breaking down social trust in favor of the state. The crime / moral violation forever separates people from their victims, who are the other part of society. Who can re-trust a spouse or friend they knew betrayed their most secret trusts? Who will trust a promise to agree to disagree from someone who split another's head open for ideological failure? Once you do an indisputably unjust thing in service of the unjust state, that makes you both an accomplice of the state and having an interest in maintaining it against the people who would bring it to account, for justice against it could also mean justice against you.
This tendency works better the more of the population you turn against the rest, and the more extreme the injustice. If it were 'just a handful of people,' then the crimes of the revolution could be projected/shifted to that tiny minority, and by proxy 'absolve' the rest. This is counter-revolutionary, because the goal of the revolution is to claim and change the people, not give them an easy target and rationalization for rejecting the revolution.
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