domain:nunosempere.com
hydroacetylene
4m ago
Desantis and Abbott are probably fairly uncommon political talents, just like Obama was and Trump is.
HeimrArnadalr
English Supremacist
40m ago
If that is your one and only goal, then why haven't you killed yourself already and prevented decades of potential suffering?
What Big Teeth You Have!
Identity Politics and the Russian Revolution
1. Introduction
The Oxford English Dictionary defines wokeness as being alert to injustice and discrimination in society, especially racism. To be woke, by that definition, 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]
- he 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 of 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]
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 merciless and malevolent; 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 all four of 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, aka 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, 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 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 -- at 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, or the bourgeoisie -- 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 began to take 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]
and 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. One difference, however, was that the French pogrom was labeled a "Reign of terror" in hindsight by its detractors, while the Russian version was called that by its own architects and implementers, even as they planned it out.
As important as the extermination of class enemies (Lenin's word), 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, (2) guess how much the family could pay and ask it in ransom, and (3) 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 my opinion is that Lenin simply didn't want the quite 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.
ArmedTooHeavily
2hr ago
Do you actually believe that? Your whole post history here seems to me to be basically delusional histrionics, but I can't tell if you're serious or trolling.
Either way, I would be happy to take your money.
Will you take a bet on this? Test your convictions. I will give you great odds. 5 to 1?
predictions are one of the best ways available to debug one's own cognition. In this case, it seems very unlikely to me that Rittenhouse will, in fact, be dead before the next inauguration.
I'll even do you one better: not only will he be alive on inauguration day, but no attempts on his life will have been observed.
And we can go even further. Not only will he be alive, and not only will there be no attempts on his life, but he will not be prosecuted or persecuted to any extent greater than the default blue-tribe discrimination in employment. None of the self-defense cases from the Floyd Riots were killed by left-wingers; Gardner was harassed into suicide, and others were successfully prosecuted, but none of them were actually murdered, and they've already taken their shot at Rittenhouse from a legal perspective. If you want to solve a problem, it helps to not catastrophize that problem out of all proportion. The situation is bad enough without needlessly embracing despair.
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
2hr ago
That's enough.
You've filled the mod queue with these low-effort comments. Many people are reporting you with some variation of "Does he need help?"
You either do indeed need help or else you're trolling. If this is a bid for sympathy, you are in the wrong place. If you just came here to spew nihilistic doomerism, you are also in the wrong place.
You've earned multiple warnings and your posting has not improved. I'm banning you for a week and next time will move straight to a permaban if you repeat the pattern.
hydroacetylene
13m ago
Nor is the situation uniquely dire for the right! Keep in mind previous acts of defying the Feds have ended with the 101st Airborne deployed to high school.
Rumors from within DHS tells me that the federal government couldn't find anyone willing to go against the Texas state government during the border brouhaha. There's a decent chance of the federal government simply lacking a monopoly on force these days.
FaibleEstimeDeSoi
2hr ago
Holodomor, Kazakh famine which mainly implicitly or explicitly targeted other ethnicities than Russians
At least million and a half of Russians died in this collectivization caused famine, among them my great grandfather. That's so insane that post-soviet nationalists successfully reframed this tragedy caused by communist ideology, engineered by Georgian head of state and turned into reality by local ethnic party bureaucrats(orders related to Holodomor were written in Ukrainian after all) into genocide done by imperialistic evil Russians against minorities, at least in the minds of Western public.
Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
4hr ago
I largely agree, but he is currently facing a wrongful death lawsuit by Anthony Huber's father. I imagine he's going to be hounded by very well-funded civil suits for a long time as revenge for getting off. Still, this is a far shot from state prosecution or murder.
Goodguy
2hr ago
Maybe, but that isn't a good argument in the context of trying to write a critique of communism because by that standard, all American Revolution deaths are the fault of the revolutionaries, and so on. Which might be a valid argument, but my point is that it sheds no light on communism versus other political beliefs. All political movements that start revolutions can be blamed for all of the resulting deaths, by this standard, so it is not something that distinguishes communism from other ideologies.
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.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
8hr ago
giving puppy-dog eyes and saying this is just a paperwork crime and no one was hurt won't buy you a cup of coffee before you get absolutely reamed in all the least fun ways
Not to be melodramatic, but I am once again reminded of Solzhenitsyn:
If you are arrested, can anything else remain unshattered by this cataclysm?
But the darkened mind is incapable of embracing these dis placements in our universe, and both· the most sophisticated and the veriest simpleton among us, drawing on all life's experience, can gasp out only: "Me? What for?"
And this is a question which, though repeated millions and millions of times before, has yet to receive an answer.
Arrest is an instantaneous, shattering thrust, expulsion, somer sault from one state into another.
We have been happily borne-or perhaps have unhappily dragged our weary way-down the long and crooked streets of our lives, past all kinds of walls and fences made of rotting wood, rammed earth, brick, concrete, iron railings. We have never given a'thought to what lies behind them. We have never tried to pene trate them with our vision or our understanding. But there is where the Gulag country begins, right next to us, two yards away from us. In addition, we have failed to notice an enormous num ber of closely fitted, well-disguised doors and gates in these fences. All those gates were prepared for us, every last one! And all of a sudden the fateful gate swings quickly open, and four white male hands, unaccustomed to physical labor but none theless strong and tenacious, grab us by the leg, arm, collar, cap, ear, and drag us in like a sack, and the gate behind us, the gate to our past life, is slammed shut once and for all.
That's all there is to it! You are arrested!
And you'll find nothing better to respond with than a lamblike bleat: "Me? What for?"
That's what arrest is: it's a blinding flash and a blow which shifts the present instantly into the past and the impossible into omnipotent actuality. That's all. And neither for the first hour nor for the first day will you be able to grasp anything else.
Except that in your desperation the fake circus moon will blink at you: "It's a mistake! They'll set things right!"
When you're hauled in front of "Judge" Darkeh who articulates her spitting contempt for the American Constitution, the rational expectation would be that you're about to receive justice in a pretty similar fashion to what those victims of the Soviets received, but few of us ever learn that lesson, instead clinging to the hope that eventually there will be someone that sets things right.
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.
They also promised to terminate Russian involvement in the ongoing world war and sue for a separate peace. Which, I guess, was more important of a factor than this.
That was certainly an important factor in the popularity of the Bolshevik regime from 1914 to 1918, and perhaps as you suggest a more important factor -- but the question being addressed here (as indicated by the first sentence of the paragraph you quoted) is not why the 1917 Revolution was successful, but why the murderous despotism of the emerging Communist regime was not more widely foreseen from within Russia (or, for that matter, from within the United States and Western Europe), even before Russian involvement World War I.
lest someone be tempted to pick nits as an excuse to ignore the thrust of the argument
Yep, so I want to be clear, my interest in this matter is not to try to defend Soviet communism. It was a very brutal system, at least in its first few decades. I am just interested in historical accuracy.
I think that you should try to clearly define what you mean by Soviet communism having killed somebody.
- Direct deliberate killing (guys from NKVD come to apartment, take guy away in car and kill him).
- Indirect killing (guys come to farm and take away all the grain, farmers die).
- Deaths through negligence or just because communism isn't a very good economic system.
For me, it makes sense to count #1 and #2, but not #3. Partly this is because it is extremely hard to accurately count #3.
And do you count military deaths in wars, or just civilian deaths as a result of political persecution?
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.
If you count every civilian killed as a result of Soviet military actions, that would add another 5 million or so, but that would not help a critique of communism much because the US and its allies also killed millions of civilians during WW2 and the Cold War, so killing large numbers of civilians in war time seems to be more a feature of large scale war, rather than of a country's political system.
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.
I think Russians will probably be more fine with that than ex-Soviet non-Russians would be. Only a minority of Lithuanians or Ukrainians would be ok with being called Russians, on the other hand there are probably plenty of Russians who, while not considering Lithuanians or Ukrainians to be ethnically Russian, would still be more or less ok with them being called Russian in a certain sense of the word Russian if they were re-incorporated into the Moscow-based empire.
But I didn't bring it up in order to nit-pick, it's actually important because I wasn't sure if you actually meant ethnic Russians, or you meant Soviets in general. I understand now that you meant Soviets in general, but I had no way of knowing that when I first read your post.
The Soviet Union was a multi-ethnic empire and even modern Russia is also still a multi-ethnic empire despite not having as much territory as the Soviet Union had.
A lot of the bad blood from the Soviet times comes down to people arguing about whether:
Theory A: The Soviet Union was pro-Russian and oppressed other ethnicities. Ethnic non-Russian nationalists tend to agree with this, and there is good reason to believe it given for example the Holodomor. On the other hand, many of the Holodomor's architects were not ethnic Russians.
Theory B: The Soviet Union was anti-Russian and actually helped non-Russian ethnicities to form their own nationalist movements. Ethnic Russian nationalists tend to agree with this. The idea that the Soviet Union was anti-Russian might seem strange, but the Russian ethnonationalists who argue for this point of view point out that the Soviet Union's leadership in its important years was not particularly ethnically Russian (Lenin was probably part Kalmyk, part Jewish... Trotsky was Jewish... Stalin was Georgian...) and that the Soviets had a policy of (Korenizatsiia)[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korenizatsiia]. On the other hand, given that the Soviet Union was about 50% ethnic Russian (in practice, you could probably say even more because back then, many people who in modern terms are non-ethnic Russians were maybe more likely to view themselves and be viewed as ethnic Russian than they are now), it's also clear that Russians were the dominant ethnicity by population size at least - no other single ethnicity had nearly such a fraction of the population.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
4hr ago
That doesn't seem like a very good goal, and judging by your interactions here, it doesn't seem to be working for you all that well. If you are not currently suffering quite badly, you're faking it really well.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
1hr ago
For what it’s worth, I always get an error when I try and view votes.
yellowgreenred
43m ago
Thanks for this. No idea why you were downvoted.
2rafa
2hr ago
The more common Western opinion (if they have heard of the holodomor at all) is that it was caused by communism. That said, the only people who really discuss it are either American libertarians/conservatives or generic neoliberal NATOwave type Central Europeans who vote center-right and see Russia and communism as essentially the same thing.
cjet79
2hr ago
The best fits are recommended below. I'd second the reca for cyberpunk, ghost recon, and dishonored.
If you want to try something a little different, Zero Sievert is a top down stealth shooter and roguelite. Extended firefights are a bad idea, and I had a real sense of caution and danger. Whenever I got too carefree I was punished with death.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
2hr ago
Sliders was pretty clear about 2021 as an inflection point. In my opinion, that’s way too late.
The current backlash is a development of populism which has been brewing (at least) since Obama was in office. Crediting DeSantis and Abbott with reinventing conservative opposition? That’s the same kind of mistake as people insisting Trump is going to abolish democracy. He’s not special. They’re not special. For that matter, Obama wasn’t special, either. The situation circa 2010 was uniquely suited to a libertarian opposition. Since then, that support has been redirected to Trump’s platform.
Describing that as “the right realizing they were in a war” is, uh, cope.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
6hr ago
So, why are federal gun laws enforced in gun-friendly states?
I can think of several factors that contribute to this.
First, what does it mean for a state to be "gun-friendly"? I mean, most people on the pro-gun side support "reasonable" restrictions — where "reasonable" is often heavily influenced by status-quo bias (the conservative side of the leftward ratchet) — and the "2nd Amendment right to personal nukes" position is mostly just a few fringe (if vocal) libertarian types. And states are not politically homogenous; even your most "gun-friendly" state is going to have plenty of people — particularly in the cities — who support increasing gun restrictions.
In particular, the people in state government — particularly the lawyers and paper-pushing bureaucrats — you'd be counting on to push and coordinate this resistance to enforcement skew both urban and especially college-educated, which means they skew left and anti-gun. (Personnel is policy, and modern forms of government ensure urban leftist personnel.)
Second, way too many on the right are believers in "the rule of law." Like the sportsman who will not respond to a cheating opponent by cheating back because he has too much "respect for the game," they believe in the importance of procedure over outcome — following the rules and doing the right thing over getting better results. They are deontologists and virtue ethicists, not utilitarians. Fiat justitia ruat caelum. For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul? Better to suffer defeat, torture, and death while upholding your values than to attain a political victory by compromising them. (Because God will reward you for the former and damn you for the latter.)
Indeed, for any "the left is doing [x], why isn't the right doing [x] back?" question you can pose, you're sure to find someone on the right insisting that our steadfast, virtuous refusal to do [x] is the thing that separates us from the left, that to do [x] back would not just be sinking to the level of our enemies, it would be to become our enemy, and that anyone who would consider doing [x] is a leftist, no matter their other positions.
Third, quod licet Jovi, non licet bovi. The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. What works for the left against the right will not necessarily work for the right against the left. Leftists can get away with doing things for left-wing causes that would see rightists punished severely if they tried to use them for right-wing ones. It's not hypocrisy, it's hierarchy.
I see 2021 as a time where the right got comfortable adopting tactics the left had been using longer.
Before 2021 I thought the GOP stayed towards traditional powers like voter backlashes or challenging things in the Supreme Court.
Post 2021 they have added more direct challenges like busing illegals to blue states, giving a FU to Biden on the border when I think his position wins in court, muddling things up in lawfare (which is different from doing what a court tells you to do), etc.
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