Exactly. BTW, Honey_Bee, I've been having a lot of conversations with my father recently. He's very old and likely won't be around in a few more years. The conversation that we have most often is his disappointment in this country's descent into Socialism and Cultural Marxism. He tells me he recognizes the signs of it everywhere and he worries about me and my family and what kind of lives we'll have after he's gone. He told me to be prepared. He said, "you were always the long term planner and the smart one. Get prepared, because it is coming and you need to know how to run and where to run to." That's a direct quote and it broke my heart. Here's an old guy that fled Socialism and Communism to come to this country to become a citizen, legally, and in the right way, paid his taxes all his life, never asking anyone for anything. He never returned to the country where he was born and never wanted to. He was fiercely patriotic of the US and he made sure his family was successful and that we were hard workers like he was. I went to Catholic schools, where the priests fled Communist countries themselves. So I grew up steeped in all the stories of Communism and Socialism and the terror people felt living under those systems.
We owe everything to my father and his indomitable spirit. He came here to be free from tyranny, and yet, now he's scared, not for himself, but for me and his grandkids. I am worried too. I see all the signs my father sees and I know it is coming. It is virtually unstoppable, because our universities and 99% of mainstream media, as well as social media, are brainwashing all the kids and filling their heads with atheism, cultural marxism, identity politics, hatred of anyone who doesn't stick to the liberal dogma, and that violence is ok to enforce their beliefs and silence conservatives. By 2030, the Millenials will be running this country. They look like AOC and Ilhan Omar. They hate capitalism and conservatives, who they always call racists. They love not just socialism, but a particularly virulent brand of totalitarianism. You can read AOC's thoughts simply by reading the Green New Deal. She bared her soul in that document and with it, she revealed the evil that is coming for us all in this country. We may laugh at AOC's crazy talk and think the US will survive this latest trend, but she is the face of the Millennials, and so is Ilhan. The Millennials love those two. So either one could be the new Eva Peron, Kirchner, Chavez, Maduro, or Castro of the USA. They not only have the means and the motive, but the massive adoration of their generation to accomplish this. In many ways, the Cultural Revolution, which always precedes the takeover of the government, has already occurred. How many on this thread would not be so open with your opinions out in real life? Don't we all censor ourselves now? I have my MAGA hat hung up in my closet where no one will see it and I refuse to wear it outside, because I don't want to get beaten up or have someone vandalize my house or hurt my family. These are cultural signs of tyranny. All of us should be scared and make sure we tell everyone we know what is coming. We may have the fight of our lives directly ahead. I prefer it all remain peaceful and at the ballot box, but these violent liberals don't seem to be giving anyone a choice. Hayden comes to mind. If it gets violent here against conservatives, then my family will just leave to go to some other country less violent, because we have the money to do so, but will there be anywhere else to run to? Where do you go, when the whole of Western Civilization has bought into the madness of Totalitarian Socialism and the destabilizing practice of opening your borders to people who are either hostile to your way of life, or at a minimum, have no respect for your laws?
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Beating The Cultural Revolution
By Rod Dreher • March 8, 2019, 4:44 AM
Hello from snowy and not-un-Siberia-like upstate New York, where I’m attending a conference at the Russian Orthodox monastery and seminary. At dinner last night with some conference-goers, I was talking about my ideas for my upcoming book. As you regular readers know, I plan to write about the warnings people living here who grew up under Soviet and Eastern European communism are now sounding about the emerging totalitarianism in our own increasingly post-liberal culture. Many of you weren’t keen on me framing this as a recrudescent socialism, because I am talking mostly about culture, not political economy.
The thing is, socialism is not only about political economy. It’s a way of seeing the world. One of my Orthodox professor friends here at the conference said that Dostoevsky, no aristocrat, understood this. I found this bit last night online, describing Dostoevsky’s view on socialism:
"The Rousseauistic view of human nature on which utopian socialism rested was severely challenged by Dostoevsky’s experience of prison in Siberia. The theoretical notion of the fundamental goodness of human beings was now tested against the reality of human nature in the raw. The unrepentant brawlers, thieves, and murderers with whom he spent four years were not merely innocent victims who would happily live in brotherhood and harmony once freed from repressive institutions. Returning from ten years in Siberia Dostoevsky encountered a socialism that had taken on a much more revolutionary cast. His remarks about it in both fiction and journalism over the next two decades are almost uniformly hostile. The enmity—largely theoretical—between Christianity and the socialism of the late [Vissarion] Belinsky and his circle, had now become a reality, and this revolutionary and atheistic doctrine the major rival of Christianity for the hearts and minds of the new generation. Dostoevsky’s critique of socialism, then, begins with its atheism. Dismissing the essential spiritual nature of human beings, the socialists can concern themselves only with man’s material needs. As Dostoevsky wrote in his notebook for 1863-1864: ‘The socialists want to regenerate humans, to liberate them, to present them without God and the family. They conclude that having forcibly changed the economic way humans live they will achieve their goals. But humans are transformed not from external reasons but only from moral changes.’ In his notes for an unfinished article, ‘Socialism and Christianity,’ Dostoevsky wrote that ‘the socialists go no further than the belly.’ Lacking any spiritual basis for human brotherhood, the socialists must resort to compulsion to establish it. French socialism, he wrote in 1877, ‘is nothing other than the compulsory union of humanity’; or, as he said, more vividly, about the slogan of Roman Catholicism, which he saw as sharing the goals of socialism, ‘Fraternité ou la mort’ (‘Be my brother, or off with your head’). These two ideas—that human problems can be solved by exclusively material remedies, but that this cannot be done without compulsion—run through Dostoevsky’s critique of socialism."
Point is, there really is a lot of “socialism” in Whatever This Thing We’re Dealing With Is. Marxist modes of thought are great at tearing down what we have, but insofar as nobody really believes in the Revolution anymore, it doesn’t offer much to replace it. The political theorist Augusto Del Noce captured a key aspect of what we’re dealing with now when he wrote: “the new totalitarianism is very different from older forms because it is a totalitarianism of disintegration, even before being a totalitarianism of domination. It dominates by disintegrating.”
Still, I am persuaded by some recent offline conversations that framing it as socialism obscures more than it illuminates. Two points a friend made bring this out:
This phenomenon is not driven only by the state (and maybe not even primarily by the state), but by private actors, especially educational institutions and big corporations. How is that socialism?If we elected Republicans — members of the supposedly anti-socialist party — from now until forever, and if we left the free market unchanged, that would make no meaningful difference in stopping the progress of this disintegration. So how can we honestly tag this as socialism?I find these points to be unanswerable. Maybe you disagree.
A reader sent me a link to Peggy Noonan’s latest column (which is behind a paywall). She says that our condition in the US these days reminds her of China’s Cultural Revolution, especially the “struggle sessions” in which fanatical young communists forced supposed enemies of the Revolution to confess their sins publicly (whether they were guilty or not). Noonan writes:
"I don’t want to be overdramatic, but the spirit of the struggle session has returned and is here, in part because of the internet, in part because of the extremity of our politics, in part because more people are lonely. “Contention is better than loneliness,” as my people, the Irish, say, and they would know.
The air is full of accusation and humiliation. We have seen this spirit most famously on the campuses, where students protest harshly, sometimes violently, views they wish to suppress. Social media is full of swarming political and ideological mobs. In an interesting departure from democratic tradition, they don’t try to win the other side over. They only condemn and attempt to silence.
The spirit of the struggle session is all over Twitter . On literary Twitter social-justice warriors get advance copies of new books and denounce them for deviationism—as insensitive, racist, appropriative, anti-LGBTQ. Books on the eve of publication have been pulled, sometimes withdrawn by authors who apologize profusely. Everyone’s scared. And the tormentors are not satisfied by an apology. They’re excited by it and prowl for more prey.
There’s a feeling in the air, isn’t there? We’re all noticing pieces of the story here and there, in this incident and that. But maybe it has an overall meaning. And maybe that meaning isn’t good."
Reading this, it hit me: I’ve had the wrong commies in mind! What the former anti-communist dissidents among us are recognizing is the totalitarianism inherent in a new Cultural Revolution, the contours of which we are only just now beginning to discern.
The book I’m going to write is about how to hold on through the Cultural Revolution now upon us. It shares many characteristics with hardline socialism, but it is also significantly different — so much so that trying to pin it on socialism proper is problematic.
It is certainly the case that if our own American socialists came to power, they would implement the full panoply of identity politics leftism, though that wouldn’t be their main priority. But Del Noce, again, is acutely correct when he points out that it’s a mistake to think that totalitarianism requires a police state. It can exist even in democracies, he said, because totalitarianism is a condition in which politics invades all of life.
I wish you could see my e-mails or have the kinds of personal conversations I have with academics and people involved in public life. They make fairly mild statements critical of the woke, but ask me not to identify them. They’re afraid. They see what happens to dissenters. A friend told me this week, “You’re lucky, in a way. You’ll never be hired in a newsroom again, after the things you’ve written. You can say what you think.”
Yes, as long as there’s a TAC (thank you, donors). But if I lost my job here? We don’t have a state telling people not to hire the likes of me. We don’t need one. Sixty percent of employers in this poll said they check the social media profiles of potential hires, and include what they find there in their decisions. You think China is the only country with a social credit system?
A friend in DC told me this week that he was recently at a dinner party where one of the other guests said to him, “Growing up in the Soviet Union, my parents taught me never to believe a thing I heard in the media, and to be very careful what I say out loud. Now I find myself telling my children the same thing.”
That’s our country. That’s our Cultural Revolution. That’s the framing for this next book. It’s eventually going to burn itself out (I hope), but not for a long time, and not before doing a hell of a lot of damage. Our task is to fight it openly where we can, but to build up resistance in ourselves and in our communities. Almost one year ago, to the day, I spent one of the most important evenings of my life with the Benda family in Prague. Here’s my account of what I learned there. The most important lesson: the same strategies that the Bendas used to endure communism without losing their minds or their souls are keeping them solidly grounded in their faith and traditions in their post-communist capitalist society, which is the most atheist in Europe.
Those people know how to live. They have wisdom for us. So do others who came through communism. They can help us beat the Cultural Revolution.
UPDATE: Theodore Dalrymple:
In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to. |
