After around three decades of increasing progressive Marxism and “Woke” nonsense, the assaults seem (or appear) to have subsided somewhat. It’s no longer “in your face” as badly as it was under the Obama Administration. But, I am here to tell you that it has not subsided, that it is not going away. It is only in remission, and we can expect that the dangerous stew that is brewing inside our schools, inside our institutions, and inside our government is going to boil-over. Maybe not now, and maybe not under a Trump Presidency, but it will decidedly boil-over and it will affect YOU.
Here is an interesting article from a Russian Immigrant that is in the university setting and comments on what it is like being around all these “woke” progressive Marxist idealists… the very ones that will be running America very shortly. Please pay attention, and understand that America is destined for change…
It might be calm and methodical, or radical and abrupt with many painful days. But whatever form it takes, it will be uncomfortable. Read this and consider what it means when every company, every school, every bureaucracy, every organization and at every government level these people are in control…
This is a reprint of “Postcard From Pre-Totalitarian America” by Rod Dreher . It was written on 18FEB20. All credit to the authors and please note that it is edited to fit this venue.
Postcard From Pre-Totalitarian America
Woke! ‘The fanatical glimmer in their eyes really scares me’
Last year, I spoke to a Soviet-born scholar who teaches in an American public university. I’m using a quote from our discussion in my forthcoming (September) book, Live Not By Lies. This morning, she sent me this e-mail, which I reproduce here with her permission:
I know from your blog that the work on your new book is going well and I’m glad because, boy, it’s so needed.
I’m observing some disturbing developments on my campus, and we are really not one of those wokester schools for spoiled brats one normally associates with this kind of thing.
This academic year I’ve had an opportunity to work with some early-career academics. These are newly-minted PhDs that are in their first year on the tenure-track.
What’s really scary is that they sincerely believe all the woke dogma.
Older people – those in their forties, fifties or sixties – might parrot the woke mantras because it’s what everybody in academia does and you have to survive.
But the younger generation actually believes it all.
Transwomen are women, black students fail calculus because there are no calc profs who “look like them,” ‘whiteness’ is the most oppressive thing in the world, the US is the most evil country in history, anybody who votes Republican is a racist, everybody who goes to church is a bigot but the hijab is deeply liberating.
I gently mocked some of this stuff (like we normally do among older academics), and two of the younger academics in the group I supervise actually cried…
Because they believe all this so deeply, and I’d even say fanatically, that they couldn’t comprehend why I wasn’t taking it seriously.
The fanatical glimmer in their eyes really scared me.
Back in the USSR in the 1970s and the 1980s nobody believed the dogma.
People repeated the ideological mantras for cynical reasons, to get advanced in their careers or get food packages. Many did it to protect their kids. But nobody sincerely believed.
That is what ultimately saved us.
As soon as the regime weakened a bit, it was doomed because there were no sincere believers any more.
Everybody who did take the dogma seriously belonged to the generation of my great-grandparents.
In the US, though, the generation of the fanatical believers is only now growing up and coming into its prime.
We’ll have to wait until their grand-kids grow up to see a generation that will be so fed up with the dogma that it will embrace freedom of thought and expression. But that’s a long way away in the future.
I’m mentoring a group of young scholars in the Humanities to help them do research, and I’m starting to hate this task.
Young scholars almost without exception think that scholarship is entirely about repeating woke slogans completely uncritically.
Again, this is different from the USSR where scholars peppered their writing with the slogans but always took great pride in trying to sneak in some real thinking and real analysis behind the required ideological drivel.
Every Soviet scholar starting from the 1970s was a dissident at heart because everybody knew that the ideology was rotten.
All of this is sad and very scary.
I never thought I’d experience anything worse, anything more intellectually stifling than the USSR of its last two decades of existence. But now I do see something worse.
The book you are writing is very important, and I hope that many people hear your message.
Folks, Americans are extremely naive about what’s coming. We just cannot imagine that people who burst into tears in the face of gentle mockery of their political beliefs can ever come to power.
They are already in power, in the sense that they have mesmerized leaders of American institutions.
I’m telling you, that 2015 showdown on Yale’s campus between Prof. Nicholas Christakis and the shrieking students was profoundly symbolic.
Christakis used the techniques of discursive reason to try to establish contact with these young people.
None of it mattered.
They yelled and cursed and sobbed.
The fact that he disagreed with them, they took as an assault on their person.
And Yale University caved to them!
This stuff is so outrageous that we can’t wrap our minds around how these people will ever come to rule us. Listen to what these people who grew up under communism are saying!
Nadine Gordimer said:
“All the young are candidates for the solutions of communism or fascism when there are no alternatives to despair or dissipation.”
The religion of social justice is rushing in to fill the vacuum. Nice liberals, and nice conservatives, cannot allow themselves to think of where this might go. Solzhenitsyn knew better:
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.
So did Dr. Silvester Krcmery, a Slovak Catholic lay leader in the underground church, who suffered isolation and torture in a communist prison for his faith and resistance.
In the memoir he wrote after communism’s fall, Krcmery warned future generations that the past could be prelude to the future if they were not vigilant:
We are so often naive in our thinking. We live, contented and safe, with the idea that in a civilized country, in the mostly cultured and democratic environment of our times, such a coercive regime is impossible.
We forget that in unstable countries, a certain political structure can lead to indoctrination and terror, where individual elements and stages of brainwashing are already implemented.
This, at first, is quite inconspicuous.
However, often in a very short time, it can develop into a full undemocratic totalitarian system.
Hannah Arendt, in her 1951 study The Origins of Totalitarianism, said these factors in German and Russian society made them susceptible to Nazism and Bolshevism, respectively:
- Loneliness
- Social Atomization
- Loss of Faith In Hierarchies And Institutions
- The Desire To Transgress And Destroy
- Indifference to Truth, and the Willingness To Believe Useful Lies
- A Mania for Ideology
- A Society That Values Loyalty More Than Expertise
- The Politicization of Everything
If you think we’re not going on full-tilt on these things, you aren’t paying attention.
Some people seem to think that the Arendt list is somehow faulting the Left. It’s not, at least not intentionally. She said these factors were present in both Germany, which went to the hard right, and Russia, which went to the hard left. I think these factors are present in our society, period. Some of them are stronger on the Left, it is true, but I think they’re all simply present. Is loneliness a Right or a Left thing? Is social atomization?
Conclusion
I read this article with a great degree of sadness. Americans are within a propagandized bubble. Outside of that bubble, everything is dark, evil and dangerous. Inside that bubble you are either ‘woke” or an enemy.
I am outside the bubble and I see all of this quite clearly.
Outside the Bubble
I am in Communist China, but it doesn’t resemble anything like what Americans fear it to be.
Yet, it almost went off-the-cliff.
There was a big show-down between the hard-line Communist / Marxist elements and their armies of progressive idealists during the “cultural revolution” and it could have gone downhill really fast.
Instead they embraced other things… like traditional conservative Chinese values, the idea of working hard and achieving things through merit, and contributing instead of fighting the government.
And..
… and now today, China is a nation of traditional conservative pragmatists, and all those Marxist idealists are off in re-education camps. Like the Falin Gong, the “pro-democracy” pawns, and the Muslim religious extremists.
You don’t hear about all that.
America is about “democracy!” China doesn’t have it. So it’s bad.
People! The world is not what CNN, and FOX tell you. It is something all together different. Now, I can talk until I am blue in my face, but you will never be convinced until you experience things FIRST HAND. I implore you to do just that.
So, just recognize that the world “outside” of America is not what you are led to believe and expect.
Meanwhile… on the inside of this bubble….
Inside of the Bubble
Radical idealists are now infiltrating all the organs of power. The government and the political factions are permitting this, and soon, once they have regained full control of the levers of power, they will implement their ideology.
- First will be the disarming.
- Then will be the collections of people on the lists.
- Then will be the FEMA camps.
What comes next will not be recorded for history.
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