To all leftists and “Resistance” members
As a straight, white, Christian, right-wing, middle class male of European extraction I get told to shut up a lot. As you can imagine, this does not at all stop me from speaking out…
But if lived experience is indeed the be-all-end-all that the identarian left considers it to be, there is one area where my lived experience without a doubt shit all over the lived experience of the woke folk. Unlike all those among them who have been born and/or raised in the West and have zero or almost zero experience of living under anything other than a liberal democratic government (which is 99 per cent of them at least), I have lived the first 15 years of my life under the Soviet block-style communism, or “real socialism” as the Party used to call it…
So to all the women dressing up in costumes from “Handmaid’s Tale” who think they’re on the brink of living in a misogynist theocracy,
To all those calling themselves “The Resistance”, as if they were the French Maquis or the Polish Home Army shooting collaborators and derailing trains after their country has been brutally occupied by a totalitarian foreign power,
To those who think that America is currently in a grip of fascism and are calling on the military to stage a coup to remove the President…
To all those who have compared Trump to Hitler…
you really have no idea, and I mean it with the greatest possible respect. Actually, I don’t. Most of you are supposedly mature, rational adults but you seem to have at best the most superficial knowledge of history and a complete lack of self-awareness, any sense of perspective, and an ability to contextualise. Having spent your lives relatively free of hardship, deprivation and persecution on any remotely comparable scale to people in other, less fortunate corners of the world, you probably get some frisson from believing yourself to be big actors at a critical time in history, the last line of separating civilisation from the descent into new dark ages. You’re free to engage in whatever ideological cosplay you want, but don’t expect others to take you seriously.
You can pick up any of the thousands of books written about life under a dictatorship and read all about it, or you can watch a doco or listen to a podcast, but clearly you couldn’t be bothered to do so thus far in your life, so I’m going to give you potted version of how a real tyranny (it does not particularly matter whether communist or fascist as they are quite similar in practice, which is of course another thing you don’t want to hear, but that’s tough – they certainly have far more in common with each other than with a free society) works and what the world in which I was growing up looked like…
He proceeds to tell them what that world looked like.
The whole thing is well worth reading.
I see way too many opinion letters in the local newspapers that compare Trump to the Nazis’ and Hitler. Being a “historian” (OK I have BA/MA in History – earned when History was History, not PolySci) this scares me.
At first, I thought this was by Oleg Atbashian of “The People’s Cube”. Oleg has a similar background and has a couple of books to his credit. His site is not nearly as active as a few years back but there are still humorous nuggets aplenty.
http://www.thepeoplescube.com/
I have forwarded Chrenk’s article to my two Romanian sons. They saw even less of this, but still enough of the aftermath to be impatient with liberals. And both live in places that have plenty: one in Norway, and one in Nome (the native population is overwhelmingly Democrat.)
Being a “historian” (OK I have BA/MA in History – earned when History was History, not PolySci) this scares me.
LYNN HARGROVE: I’m a big believer in knowing history for a broader context in which to understand the current world. It certainly made a difference to me.
However, I can’t help but notice today’s American historians are mostly left-wing and prone to bizarrely hasty partisan judgments like Bush 43 as the worst President of all time years before his second term was over.
Yes, I know the academy remains in the throes of the Gramscian Long March but still, I would have thought historical knowledge of the real Hitler and the real Nazis, as well as the horror of real communism, would have provided some immunization against such terrible false equivalences. Clearly not.
I can’t quite blame the kids (and grownups) who don’t know who fought who in WW II or the existence of the gulags for their easy, trendy anti-Americanism, but historians who don’t get it are harder to understand.
Arthur Chrenkoff’s mystery/sci-fi book Night Trains is a lot of fun, BTW.
Arthur Chrenkoff- hadn’t heard of him in years. Guess he got going again.
When you believe in things you don’t understand you suffer (excuse me Stevie) and you make millions suffer. Failure to question your own beliefs by acquiring a wide range of information is just human nature. Hear no, see no, speak no.
Arthur Chrenkoff- hadn’t heard of him in years. Guess he got going again.
huxley:
Very simple answer: lefties are in charge of hiring and firing at the university level. If historians don’t adhere to the lefty creed, they don’t get a tenure track position. In addition, open non-adherence to the lefty creed de jour would make getting and hanging on to a poorly paid adjunct position rather problematic.
I’ve been watching the Amazon series, “The Man in the High Castle,” based on the Philip K. Dick sci-fi novel of same name. Quite good. It’s about a world in which the Nazis won WW II and have split the US with the Japanese.
Anyway, here’s an apropos exchange between Nicole, an up-and-coming Nazi filmmaker modeled on Leni Riefenstahl, and Turner, a propaganda minister in the American Reich.
_____________________________________________________
N: Reichsfuhrer also asked me to start thinking about new project.
T: I’m all ears, schatzi.
N: Jahr null. Year Zero. An experiement. A reset. A new America.
T: What’s the angle?
N: Deprive people of their national consciousness. Dilute their national pride. Do not teach their history.
T: So the Reichsfuhrer wants to erase American history.
N: They don’t have that much of it anyway.
T: When do we start?
— The Man in the High Castle, Season 3, Episode 3
Gringo: I take your point, of course. However, I wonder what are the limits of that self-selection, fear and groupthink when set against basic historical knowledge.
To what extent will American historians declaim that “2+2=5” because the Party tells them so?
Or do they know they are distorting facts, even lying, but do so because they are actually Democrat Party Operatives with Tenure?
“Having spent your lives relatively free of hardship, deprivation and persecution on any remotely comparable scale to people in other, less fortunate corners of the world, . . . ” [quoted by Neo]
Just as familiarity breeds contempt, this quote reveals how solipsistic were are int he western world. From our betters thinking that Western democracy can simply be exported to countries living within a 7th century Zeitgeist, or to believe that such people think like 2ist century Westerners, this observation clearly shows how solipsistic we Westerners generally are.
What are the hotbeds of leftism on campus? The obvious ones are the nuevo-social-justice depts. like Women’s Studies or African-American Studies. But a less obvious biggie is the English dept. Why? Because they specialize in creating and manipulating narratives. If the profs. were to be complete honest, you’d find a great many full-blown communists in English depts.
Similarly, the History dept. has great utility in tilting the playing field of historical fact and perception. You don’t need to have re-education camps if people are educated properly in the first place.
Now if you are one of these profs. and stumble across disturbing facts about your religion, then you can do what my neo-Marxist friend does. Just repeat to yourself, “Both sides do that stuff. Our democratic black-letter-law justice system never worked well or fairly; and America was never really great.”
Huxley and LYNN HARGROVE,
I hold advanced degrees in art history and even back in the 1970s during my resident study there was a Marxist art history movement afoot.
Trash then, it remains trash now, I mention it only to illustrate how long this leftist march has existed even in more fringe disciplines. than the core humanities.
I was invited to a scientific conference in East Germany in 1980 when it was still Communist and the buffer between the east and west. My father and his older brother, six years in Nazi occupied Poland, and my mother’s older brother, six years in the Gulag at the same time, gave me a very stern talking to. Even though I was over thirty at the time, they spoke to me like a child and warned me to do absolutely nothing except smile, say nothing, and keep my eyes straight ahead at all times because I had no idea of how dangerous the people running the place could be. I never heard any of them distinguish between fascism and Nazism.
My luggage got lost in transit while going from West to East Berlin and left me without toiletries or clean clothes. So, a nice English teacher took me to a pharmacy to buy some stuff to tide me over. It was Bernie Sanders’ dream. Not only did they only have one brand of tooth brush and tooth paste, they only had one of each item on the mostly bare shelves of the tiny little store. The blessings and virtues of socialism are just monumental.
One morning as we were walking to the conference venue, the Soviet garrison came marching out the gate of their barracks. They apparently hadn’t been warned that foreigners were around. Some one in our group stupidly took out his camera and starting taking pictures. After haggling by the conference organizers with the Soviets, the fellow was released but his camera was confiscated and the film destroyed. If it weren’t the first international science conference in East Germany since WWII and the State Minister of Science didn’t want a black eye, it would have turned out much worse for the photo bug.
The whole week was distressing and eye opening in a way that reading could never convey.
A twitter user who goes by “Rex Valachorum’s best friend” put out 6 ‘tweetstorms’ about his experiences of living and working in Romania. His sentiments are much the same as your linked article.
Part 1
I’m only putting in the 1st link so this comment won’t get filtered for too many links. To find the parts past the 1st, click his “moments” tab on his twitter page. I just did and it looks like he added a 7th one about a week ago too. I’m off to read that one now….
Sighted above:
I’d like to know just whom is meant by “our betters.” I admit to being a touch sensitive on this topic, but Pres. Bush 43, for instance, does seem to have been aware of the realities. He warned us in at least one speech that I’ve watched on YouTube (but I don’t have the link) that we were going to be in Iraq for a long, long time stabilizing things, keeping the peace, so forth. It’s hard for me to believe that people who’d been around for awhile (such as the dread Neo-Cons, and citizens who were aware of the German and especially the Japanese Occupations) didn’t have that figured out.
A decent teaching of history would have made it clear to all that it would take a long, long time to make a civilized country of Iraq, which was completely unused to anything vaguely approaching democratic self-rule.
But my heart still leaps at the memory of the fingers, dyed purple and proudly and happily held aloft. I wish to the bottom of my toes that that yay-hoo who occupied the Oval Office after Pres. Bush had carried on with keeping our stabilizing forces there.
The disheartening thing is that for the target audience, feelz matter more than any amount of facts.
They’re way past even having to remind themselves that “both sides do that stuff.” Actual facts are irrelevant if they run contrary to one’s feelz. I honestly don’t think that anything other than very unpleasant first-hand experience will alter that.
It’s a combination of lefty indoctrination from pretty much everywhere, along with a complete lack of real-world hardship. Not just that, they are born so recently they no longer have first-hand contact with older relatives who do know something about real life.
Julie near Chicago:
Yes, I’m touchy about that sort of neocon smear myself. None of the neoconnish people I knew or respected thought “Western democracy can simply be exported to countries living within a 7th century Zeitgeist….” anymore than one can “simply walk into Mordor,” as the Lord of the Rings trope goes.
But it seemed worth a try within a much longer time frame than the six years Obama allowed before intentionally abandoning Iraq to chaos and failure.
But as for the history of leftism as illustrated by the U.S.S.R., the movie The Soviet Story, narrated in English and with some English subtitles, is still available on UT:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1OZYoxaJ2Y
It is only the most affluent and comfortable among us that can afford to be woke. Everyone else is just trying to put food on the table and keep a roof over their head.
Iraq might be pulling itself together.
The folks who think we’re really so awful probably know better. But if you think the US is so awful-awful (h/t Friendly’s), it means you are smarter than those know-nothing patriots–I don’t have the typeface for “superior sneer”.
Oh dear. Above at 6:11 s/b, ‘… who is meant by “our betters.”’ :>(
.
This prompted the following thought. I need to write a book. To be called English Matters. *g*
I guess you’d call me a neocon (even though I’ve been conservative since Goldwater), because I recognize that the United States is the world’s policeman. When I didn’t see “American Military Government” signs going up in Iraq, I knew disaster would follow. The original plan, or what I thought was the original plan, was to station 160,000 American troops in Iraq for the next 40-60 years. Right in the heart of the Middle East, next to Iran, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Jordan and Kuwait. We would have dominated the Middle East for 50 or more years, as we did Europe. As brilliant a strategic move as MacArthur’s landing at Inchon, or maybe even the Pacific island-hoping campaign.
I suspect that was Rumsfeld and/or Cheney’s plan, but W abandoned it. Big mistake, as that tagged us as the “weak horse,” which everyone feels free to fight.
Richard Saunders: Amen.
The USA has this odd habit of NOT solving problems, not doing definitive things. We just pushed the Chicomms back across the Yalu, freed (!) Kuwait in Gulf War I but let Saddam brutalize his Shias and Kurds, refused to support the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, etc. The song goes on.
Not building the Wall is in that mix. We will not stand up to a mob of 4000 Hondurans?
We are absurd. We have become mice, not men.
I spent the last 12 years in Venezuela, watching all the independent institutions of democracy being dismantled. I witnessed its slow motion descent into a brutal totalitarian dictatorship. I saw the collapse of a previously wealthy economy and watched previously prosperous people descend into grinding poverty.
Now, having escaped that disaster, when I attempt to tell people what is going on there, I am told, “Yeah, the same thing is happening here.” I find myself dumbfounded at how anyone could correlate these two experiences and find similarities.
Roy, it is an issue of speed, not of direction.
There are indeed similarities. The slope of the curve of descent is less steep, but it is a negative slope nevertheless. You do not hear or see the chatter of the Bernies and the Kamalas? The lying, pretentious Dem. lowlifes in the Senate, like Booker? The need for a guaranteed annual income from the state, the bemoaning of high medicine and medical care costs and its Medicare-For-All cure, which notions cannot be funded, so if enacted will slide us into a big Venezuela as surely as if our Prez were Chavez/Maduro. We had a Chavez in Obama, do you not see that?
I mean it with the greatest possible respect. Actually, I don’t.
Well, technically, it’s possible for respect to be as great as possible without being actually great — or existent.
Roy Nathanson, are you aware of the Bill Ayers-Chesa Boudin- Venezuela connection? As most readers of this thread are not, I will recount.
Chesa Boudin is the son of Kathy Boudin and David Gilbert, Weather Underground members who were imprisoned for their roles in the 1981 Brinks Robbery. Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn acted as surrogate parents for Chesa from his infancy on. “Chesa” was named for Che Guevara and South America, which was prophetic considering where Chesa went.
After getting his degree from Yale, Chesa Boudin did the backpacking trip through Latin America- much as I did. He recounts his trip in the book Gringo. Chesa experienced Latin America as only a member of radical royalty can. IIRC, within 24 hours of arriving in Caracas, he was invited to Miraflores, which as Ray well knows, is the Venezuelan equivalent of our White House. Chesa spent a year or so working in Miraflores. Not too many backpackers get invited to work at Miraflores. I didn’t. There are advantages to belonging to radical royalty. The Boudin radical pedigree goes back a long way.
Bill Ayers, Chesa’s surrogate father, came down to Caracas circa 2006 and made a speech praising- what else- the Bolivarian “Revolution.” Which shows the co-author of Prairie Fire hasn’t changed much at all.
The irony about comparing our current crop of Democrat politicians to Chavez or Maduro is that there is a substantial part of the Venezuelan opposition that cannot decide who is worse- Trump or Maduro.
Reminds of how the “bien-pensants” so insist on likening Trump to Jeremy Corbyn….
These people—intelligent, kind, decent, loving, beneficial though many of them may be—haven’t a clue, so tenacious is the hate they’ve been so sedulously cultivating and have been encouraged to cultivate by the seething MSM and like-minded social media.
It’s a disease. And it’s dismaying and disheartening.
And horrifying.
Who knew that so many good, decent liberal people could become so adept at demonization and hatred?
(Ah yes, Orwell knew….)
And more dismaying, more disheartening, more horrifying is that I don’t know how these people might possibly “wake up”, as it were (though the Kavanaugh auto-da-fe did indeed wake up some of them….).
Maybe this latest stunt coming up from the south will change some minds, though I expect the MSM and the other usual suspects will milk the fiasco for all its worth so as to continue their demonization of the president along with all those who REFUSE to jump on that crazed bandwagon. Or those who even—gasp!—support him….
Those who refuse to join this insanity.
Curious, though, that many of the same people who thought the Feinstein/Ford travesty was a most excellent tactical move will likely believe that this “March of the Innocents” from Latin America will also be a similarly ingenious method to dispatch the Beast in the White House.
It’s bound to work! It can’t fail!!
And just in time for the mid-terms….
“…a Chavez in the White House…”
But far more subtle. Far more clever. Far more cunning.
And, of course, operating as best as he could within the limitations and constraints of the American context. (That is, honing his preferred weapon of “executive privilege”—and a razor-sharpened MSM—to smash, as much as he could, those constraints to smithereens.)
In fact, given his goals—and what he WAS able to accomplish—he may well be considered one of the most successful presidents in the history of the republic.
That he destroyed his party in the process (before he was able to fully “fundamentally transform” the country he despised) is an irony lost on many of those who were—and who continue to be—so utterly “blinded by the light”.
That Hillary Clinton failed in her quest to continue “the Revolution” is truly a miraculous occurrence.
Indeed, the US has been given a “new lease” on liberty. Let us do our best not to squander it.
A very powerful essay, but I’m not sure who he thinks will be moved by it, or even read it.
We on the Right are in wholehearted agreement.
Old school “liberals” (in both the general and American sense) are largely non existent in any significant degree. Alan Dershowitz. That’s about it.
The “fools” on the left read next to nothing which in any way contradicts their sacred belief system.
The “knaves” on the left know their rhetoric is 90% BS. It’s meant as agitprop. Besides, they would be entirely comfortable in a totalitarian society, just so long as they are at the top.
Well, Neo knew, and knows, and has remarked with consternation at the casual malevolence which some of her friends direct Trump’s way.
I have [probably unfairly] harangued her repeatedly to provide an explanation of their psychology; and to demand from them a critical moral and political self-audit which it is, I now grant, probably impossible to obtain: even were she willing to sacrifice friendships and lengthy associations for knowledge of how the moral gearing in their heads works.
The question that remains of some interest is just how far would they be willing to go-along in tacit, or more avowed approval, with someone who began putting into practice what they have been proclaiming they wanted.
Now, Neo has already stated that but for a couple of them, most are not deep or critical political thinkers.
How are they as moral philosophers, one wonders, when it comes to matters of literal homicide?
Orwell knew a lot things, including the Flat Earth theory.
Just read his article about it.