Reanimating the Corpse of the Alternative Society
What do you do when you don't have any ideas? You reanimate the old ones other people had, and give them a new name. Internationalists and activist political groups are relying on nobody noticing their source book is the old USSR.
Journalist and author David Satter, Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute, gives a fascinating account of what it was like to live in. It's chilling.
"It was like living in a giant theater of the absurd in which an entire population was organized to to act out a false version of reality that was so pervasive that people who grew up in it didn't realize its artificiality. But i as a foreign visitor was perfectly aware of it. You had newspapers that didn't contain any truthful information; you had a parliament which always voted yes; you had trade unions which always supported management. And the entire population was organized in collectives, supposedly run by the party, in which the line of the party was repeated mechanically word for word by millions of people."
The comparison hasn't escaped a lot of people. Bill Maher outright named the Soviet Union during a tirade on "woke" purges emerging on social media:
Chris Donaldson
The collapse of the "alternative society" left a wide, gaping idealistic hole in those whose lives who been defined by a revolutionary yearning for rebellion against the seeming unfairness of Western free markets. The final end in 1989 of the alternative dream, under a fog of genocidal totalitarianism, was a tragedy to a generation of academics and ideologues intent on proving the Utopia was possible.
Its influence was so mourned, the Washington Post dedicated more than a single article to its loss:
This problem is not new. It vexed Churchill in 1933:
"Our difficulties come from the mood of unwarrantable self-abasement into which we have been cast by a powerful section of our own intellectuals. They come from the acceptance of defeatist doctrines by a large proportion of our politicians. But what have they to offer but a vague internationalism, a squalid materialism, and the promise of impossible Utopias?"
Where Did It Come From?
Communism's core ideology can be traced back to the ideas of the French Revolution (particularly romanticist Jean-Jacques Rousseau) and German idealist Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. In France at the turn of the eighteenth century, the impetus was to entirely "re-make" everything about the world according to a collective view of existence expressed through the State.
Hegel attempted to bring the concept of alchemy (literally the conversion of lead to gold by chemical process) into the realm of philosophy and truth. He described a process of "dialectic", wherein a thesis was confronted with a conflicting antithesis exposing its problems and contradictions, eventually producing a "purified" synthesis advancing everything as progress. He believed that mankind’s destiny was to progress to a point called the Absolute, in which all people are united in a higher, spiritual understanding. He also formulated theories about how groups "awaken" to their position to each other and the "struggle" which results, becoming known as the "Master–slave dialectic".
A Young Hegelian futurist named Karl Marx broke away from his religion-attacking contemporaries during the throes of the Industrial Revolution to assign blame for the control of the "superstructure" on the accumulation of capital to create "surplus value". In the 1840s, after moving to Paris and meeting Friedrich Engels, he distributed the Communist Manifesto: an antithesis which claimed history was based on class struggle (rich/poor or lordship/bondage dialectic), and called for the abolition of private property. Twenty years later, he published Das Kapital as an antithesis of the theses of Adam Smith and David Ricardo, taking Hegel's ideas into the domain of economics.
Marx's claims were property rights protected rich capitalists who owned factories (the "means of production") so they could objectify and exploit labour to create surplus value. Capitalism had so many contradictions and problems, they would need to be resolved by the State, which would, by then, be a collective revolutionary force of disenchanted factory slaves who had risen up to overthrow their masters.
Around the same time, he began developing the "scientific" theory of historical materialism, which was an antithesis to the classic liberal idea of societies developing through ethereal concepts (opinions, rights, beliefs etc). Marx posited the way different classes interact to manufacture the "necessities of life" (the "mode of production") determined a society's trajectory. His and Engels "scientific socialism" predicted human progress was a sequence of steps, from primitive communism, through slavery, feudalism, private property, finally to socialism, and eventually "higher" communism.
In the 1880s, a young man called Alexander Lenin was radicalised into terrorism against the Russian monarchy, and executed by hanging. His brother Vladimir, who had renounced his faith in God after previously losing his father, also became radicalised at university into Marxism from the loss of his brother. By the turn of the century he had been exiled from Russia.
A few years later, Lenin published "What Is To Be Done?", explaining his thoughts that communist revolution should be materialised as a political party (a "vanguard") to lead the proletariat. Three years later, he was back in Russia agitating against the monarchy. His supporters, who were "majoritarians" (Bolsheviks) grew against the "minoritarians" (Mensheviks).
Ten years later, in the midst of the First World War, they overthrew the provincial government and announced the Council of People's Commissars. The Mensheviks, who denounced him as tyrant, again condemned him for seizing power illegally.
Within two decades, Nazism and Fascism had arisen in Europe as a response to Bolshevism. Mussolini imprisoned Communist leader Antonio Gramsci, whose prison diaries detailing a masterplan for destroying a country's cultural institutions were later used by Mao and Frankfurt School disciples of the Anti-Vietnam era.
What had happened was simple: a split occurred between classic liberal individualists in the Old World, and futurist sociology State collectivists in Europe who believed they had glimpsed the New World. Most of them concentrated inside "soft" targets like the education system.
In the other economic schools, such as neoclassical Lausanne, they had adopted entirely different views. The question is: why did Marxism become dominant?
Fifty years later, they were asking a different question: how did the pursuit of utopia lead to the killing of more than 100 million people? The resulting nihilism led to what we now know as post-modernism and attempt #2 in the New Left of the 1960s as it pushed "liberationism" on students who didn't want to go to Vietnam.
To these Hegelian neo-Marxist academics, the US was the thesis. The USSR was the antithesis. "Rights" movements and democratic socialism are the synthesis of these opposing approaches, or the "Third Way".
However, we see the fulfillment of Darwin in Nazism. We see the fulfilment of Marx in Lenin. We see the fulfillment of Gramsci in Mao. And arguably, we see the fulfillment of Freud in Stalinism and US consumerism.
What Was The Utopia?
Marx's claims have to be understood in the context they were made. The nineteenth century saw the unprecedented use of automated machines to undertake labour.
It's an evolutionary cycle which has now repeated four times: first with factory machines, second with electricity, radio and steel; third with transistors and computing; and now with the Internet and AI.
The initial change was so dramatic, it prompted enormous questions about the future of humanity and its composite societies. Thinkers of the time became convinced that our higher "intellectual" ideals would succumb to how we manufactured things, and the distribution so unfair it would prompt serious political unrest. In many ways, they made some astute observations, even if their predictions failed to materialise.
It was also the time of Darwin and the height of the world's most powerful empire, just before the Great War. Faith in religion had collapsed into the humanist branches of atheism and naturalism, before anyone saw its consequences.
They became convinced the "stages of progress" were inevitable. Leaders could only "manage" the changes.
However, they diverged on how it would be reached. The Fabian Society in England agreed progress should be incremental, spawning 21 Labour parties around the world.
Elsewhere, like in Russia, and later in China, others decided it needed to be forced.
Marxism was the first of many belief systems offering a "theory of everything" to replace religious thought.
- Darwin offered an explanation of Creation and nature;
- Mesmerism and Mental Science offered an explanation of prosperity;
- Spiritualism offered a means of connecting with the afterlife;
- Freud offered a way of understanding human behaviour and the soul;
- Prosperity and materialism offered a reason for living.
Karl Popper puts it perfectly in his discussion of falsifiability that historicism has little relation with truth, and more in common with pseudoscience and magical thinking:
"I began to feel more and more dissatisfied with these three theories-the Marxist theory of history, psycho-analysis, and individual psychology; and I began to feel dubious about their claims to scientific status. ...I found that those of my friends who were admirers of Marx, Freud, and Adler, were impressed by a number of points common to these theories, and especially by their apparent explanatory power. These theories appear to be able to explain practically everything that happened within the fields to which they referred. The world was full of verifications of the theory. Whatever happened always confirmed it. Thus its truth appeared manifest; and unbelievers were clearly people who did not want to see the manifest truth; who refuse to see it, either because it was against their class interest, or because of their repressions which were still "un-analyzed" and crying aloud for treatment."
In this period, we see the power of sociology to supplant religious thought and behaviour. In the period afterwards, we see its effects.
If we are to break it down, we can say this Utopian belief system asserts:
- Humans are an infinitely malleable blank slate going through stages who form a collective "will" which can seek the Good through a "contract" (Rousseau);
- Humanity is on an inevitable trajectory of historical progress (Marx);
- Bad things are a result of corrupt human mechanisms we can abandon (Rousseau, Marx);
- Reason and science can advance us instead (Darwin);
- Our progress is leading to a place of more advanced consciousness and state of being (Hegel);
- That progress will involve conflict and struggle (Hegel);
- It will be driven by changes in the way we "recognise" each other (Hegel), and confronting problems in the way we manufacture necessities (Marx), as well as our internal makeup (Freud);
- The world can and should be re-made (Rousseau);
- It is best remade in the form of the collective Will for the benefit of all (Rousseau, Marx);
- It would inevitably need to be organised in a technocratic form, with a spearhead leadership (Lenin);
- We socially construct our world through language and institutions, it can be remade through changing them (Gramsci);
- Humans are unknowingly locked into their own oppressive systems and they must be led to liberation from them by deliberate interference (Lenin, Gramsci, Marcuse);
In this light, it's simple to see why a quasi-religious belief system for people who believe they are intellectually "above" the "primitive" practice of religion, and resentful of how little they are paid considering how much they know, took on so fast. Religion was the original thesis, humanist materialism was the antithesis, and the means of dragging along those "primitive" religious types into the inevitable human Kingdom of Heaven is the synthesis.
What also stands out, in contract with classical liberalism, is the need for interference.
The sheer arrogance of it is staggering.
What we know now, a hundred years later, mathematically, from Pareto and Lausanne, is the industrial revolution didn't transform resource distribution at all, and history is really a repetitive, murderous cycle of humans creating aristocracies.
And that the Pandora's box Marx opened released a highly-pernicious, alternative cult eschatology we never named, which still persists today in the minds of world leaders.
Ironically, "progress" now means moving on from Hegel, Marx, and Freud, to something realistic.
Who Were The Neo-Soviets?
it's easiest to look at most extreme sixties radicals to understand who led the charge against the Great Satan (America) and their position in the Cold War.
It's impossible to go through them all, so the only way to begin is to look at the most obvious examples in order to decipher hallmarks. As far back as 2001, far-left terrorism was haunting the US: https://fas.org/irp/world/para/left.pdf:
"Leftist extremists were responsible for three-fourths of the officially
designated acts of terrorism in America in the 1980s. From an international perspective, of the 13,858 people who died between 1988 and 1998 in attacks committed by the 10 most active terrorist groups in the world, 74 percent were killed by leftist organizations."
A very interesting place to dig is the FBI's Most Wanted list, which provides endless profiles of fugitives from the 60s' terrorism campaigns who fled to Cuba. Take, for example, the case of Joanne Chesimard (Assata Shakur): as a member of the Black Liberation Army, she was the first woman placed on it after escaping jail time for the murder of a State Trooper, and was given asylum in Havana.
The New Left's history is extraordinary in how poisonous it is. The history is damning and a dark read:
"The New Left derived its name from the "Letter to the New Left" written in 1960 by the sociologist C. Wright Mills who had already published influential analyses of the American "power elite" and what quickly became known as "the Establishment", and "the System". In his "Letter", Mills called for a shift away from traditional union issues associated with the industrial working-class, towards the psycho-sociological issues of alienation, anomie, conformism, materialism and authoritarianism that Mills believed characterised the totality of life in Western societies. This entailed a crucial shift away from a traditional Marxist analysis of society in terms of inequalities arising from class relations within society to a libertarian or antinomian analysis that located the sources of oppression in the very nature and fabric of life in Western society as such. It was "the System" and the very structure of society that must be destroyed."
(Snip)
"The hard-left stream of the New Left was composed of various radical leftwing movements that were committed to political and social activism rather than to the cultural criticism that concerned the libertarians, or the labour activism that occupied the traditional left. Initially, it was represented by such intellectuals as C. Wright Mills, Paul Baran, and Paul Sweezy. Subsequently, it was dominated by an ideological amalgam of ideas derived from Mao Zedong, Che Guevara, Ho Chi Minh, Regis Debray, Noam Chomsky, Andre Gunder Frank, etc., and structuralist theorists such as Louis Althusser, Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. The latter brought "an obsession with language, conceived, along with knowledge, as an instrument of bourgeois oppression", that remains a defining characteristic of the left intelligentsia down to the present time. The New Left also developed under the influence of disaffected members of Western Communist parties, who were reacting to the crisis of the international Communist movement, and other revolutionary or pseudo-revolutionary groups, e.g., the Trotskyite International Socialists. In Britain, the New Left focused initially on the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, but later followed the American New Left and developed its most significant presence in the universities and amongst the intelligentsia. In Australia the New Left followed a similar path of development."
Much of this actually leads to the USSR's promotion and dissemination of domestic terrorism which we still see today being used by Iran. The Atlantic gives us a clear overview:
"Later, the Soviet Union and its allies actively supported terrorism as a means to politically inconvenience and undermine its opponents. The East German Stasi and the KGB provided funds, equipment, and "networking" opportunities to the myriad of leftist German terrorist cells in the 1960s, 70s and 80s. The Red Army Faction and the 2nd June Movement in Germany, as well as the Red Brigades in Italy, shared Marxist philosophies, a hatred of America, solidarity with the Palestinians, and opposition to the generation, some of its members still in power, that had supported the Nazis and fascists. They were good foundations for a Cold War fifth column. It was not just Europe, either: Soviet equipment, funding, training and guidance flowed across the globe, either directly from the KGB or through the agencies of key allies, like the Rumanian Securitate, the Cuban General Intelligence Directorate."
Nick Lockwood
In what can only be described as a disturbing observation, the ones who didn't end up in prison, seemed to have been taken in and celebrated by celebrated universities.
Many members of these groups attended training camps, allied with the West's enemies, or privately subscribed to their sentiments.
Bernie Sanders
Of course you start with The Bern, who loves socialist revolutions so much he seems to have traveled to the sites of them all. A vacation to Ortega's Nicaragua in 1985, then off to the USSR in 1988, to Cuba in 1989. Bernie praised them all for their free everything.
Saul Alinsky
Author of "Rules for Radicals" - dedicated to Lucifer - Alinksy invented the deceit of "community organising". Although against "top-down" approaches of the far-left, Alinsky sided with their enemies. His clients included the Black Power movement, Students for a Democratic Society, his "daughter" Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama.
Bill Ayers
Leader of the revolutionary communist terrorist group The Weather Underground, Ayers mentored Barack Obama. Now described as an "elementary education theorist", he is a retired professor in the College of Education at the University of Illinois at Chicago, formerly holding the titles of Distinguished Professor of Education and Senior University Scholar. His protege Eric Mann mentored Patrisse Cullors of Black Lives Matter.
Bernadine Dohrn
Wife of Ayers, and also a member of The Weather Underground. In 2013 she retired from her position at Northwestern University School of Law as an adjunct professor. She is also the Director of the Legal Clinic's Children and Family Justice Center, and works with the American Bar Association and ACLU.
Susan Rosenburg
A leader of the May 19th Communist Organization ("M19CO"), Rosenburg re-crafted her career as an "activist" and "advocate" after having her sentence commuted by Bill Clinton. She taught literature at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, and seminars at Hamilton College. She sits on the board of Thousand Currents, who provide "fundraising and fiscal sponsorship" for the Black Lives Matter Global Movement.
Angela Davis
A disciple of Herbert Marcuse at University of California, San Diego (MA), later recipient of the Lenin Peace Prize, lesbian feminist Davis is a longtime member of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) and is a founding member of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism (CCDS). Her resume is a global tour of international universities: Brandeis, Frankfurt, Syracuse, Humboldt, Moscow, UCLA.
Kathy Boudin
Another Weather Underground leader, after writing for Harvard, Boudin found herself as an adjunct professor at the Columbia University School of Social Work, and now the co-director and co-founder of the Center for Justice there.
Joseph Buttigieg
Joseph was founding member and president of the International Gramsci Society, who translated the communist leader's Prison Notebooks into English. His son, Mayor Pete, is the US Transport Secretary.
Jeremy Corbyn
Loser of the worst election defeat in a century, union militant millionaire Corbyn was involved in Anti-Fascist Action, the Anti-Apartheid Movement, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, advocating for a united Ireland, and the Socialist Worker Party's front group the Stop the War Coalition. He was leader of the British opposition party until 2020.
Nick Lowles
Founder of watchdog front group Hope Not Hate (previously Searchlight Information Services) and former editor of far-left Searchlight magazine, Lowles has been endlessly implicated in dubious "sting" operations, and his "researcher" Matthew Collins is a "proud" member of the UK Communist Party.
Maxine Waters
Close friend of Nation of Islam leader and heinous antisemite Louis Farrakhan, Waters' habit of inciting riots was preceded by her love of Cuba and Fidel Castro's revolutionary lands. She graduated in 1971 with a degree in sociology from California State University.
You could go on forever.
The "Class of 68" were a highly-radicalised and deranged bunch, who are now in positions of authority.
It's important to realise many political leaders we had today had a serious love affair with communist leaders: from the Trudeaus holidaying with Castro in Cuba; to Hillary Clinton writing to Saul Alinsky as a student; to Bernie Sanders spending his honeymoon in the USSR; all the way to Barack Obama's endless list of radical teachers.
The Revolution Is Winning
Understanding the link between the USSR and racial division entails a much deeper dive into how the Soviets weaponised race in the US to sow discord amongst its enemies' ranks. The Guardian collects just some of the "artwork" of the time:
Steve Rose
What Were The Ideas Of The Alternative Antithesis Society?
To understand the idea of intervention or interference in a nation state, we have to travel back to Lenin. His challenge, and later Mao's, was to transform a society by force into its new form. For a country like Russia, with immense history and tradition, it required extreme measures to usher in the promised Utopia.
The people could not be trusted to do it by themselves automatically, like the uprising. What had come before needed to be banished and destroyed in order to complete the revolution. The existence of previous ideas, rituals, loyalties, and attitudes had to be removed. The slate had to be wiped clean.
All of the communist doctrine was labelled "forward-thinking" and "progressive", while all that had come before was "backward".
Many of these things should immediately resonate if you've been following the political trajectory of the Western world in the last ten years.
A "Correct" Orthodoxy Must Be Followed
Marxist-Leninism, as espoused later by Mao, was an ideology which had a "correct" interpretation of history and reality superseding all other recordings or practices. Because of the relentless splintering of Marxist groups (e.g. Stalin and Trotsky), a specific doctrine had to be followed to "ascend" properly and achieve the Higher State which would arrive us at the Absolute.
Today: political "correctness", sensitivity "training"
A New Type of Man
The selfless, post-national, collectivist New Soviet Man who put public property before his own was to "master his own feelings, to raise his instincts to the heights of consciousness, to make them transparent, to extend the wires of his will into hidden recesses, and thereby to raise himself to a new plane, to create a higher social biologic type".
Today: the metrosexual "male feminist"
A New Type of Woman
The New Soviet Woman was a Superwoman freed from domestic concerns who balanced competing responsibilities and took on the burden of multiple roles: Communist citizen, full-time worker, wife and mother; entirely equal, educated, cultured, physically fit and working in a career of her choice. She was given International Women's Day on March 8 to celebrate in 1917.
Today: Feminism
A Technocratic Leadership Should Plan Centrally
Historical materialism, as elucidated in Marxism, is claimed to be a "scientific" historicism which is intrinsically a "hi-tec" or "sci-fi" vision of human progress. As opposed to populist democracy, technocracies are run by a faceless anguard possessing specific expertise on behalf of others. In the USSR, government was top-down, by committee, by "safeguarders" of the future ascension to communism.
Today: the CCP, the EU, the DNC, Big Tech
A Global Supra-National Class Should Coordinate
The USSR"s mission to spread communism over the globe originated from Lenin's declaration that the Bolshevilk coup was a "worldwide revolution". The Third Communist International (Comintern) was held in Moscow in 1919. It resolved "struggle by all available means, including armed force, for the overthrow of the international bourgeoisie and the creation of an international Soviet republic as a transition stage to the complete abolition of the state". The UN was created in 1945.
Today: the WTO, WEF, WHO, World Bank, IMF
Religion Should Be Spurned As A "Backward" Idea
Belief in the Party, and politics, was to replace the adherence to traditional religions which taught allegiance to a power higher than the State itself. Lenin believed the peasants were "backward" because they relied on their Russian Orthodox faith and were capable of believing "fairy tales." Then, he destroyed the churches.
Today: New Atheism, liberationist neo-religion
The 1% Hoard From the 99%
The Bern's idea is straight out Marx, again. The 1%, Billionaire Class, or the Bourgeoisie, are the upper middle and upper class who own the means of production and exist to preserve their supremacy through accrual of capital and property value. The 99% are everyone else, the workers.
Today: Bernie, Occupy, AOC
Speech Codes Must Be Adhered To
A speech code describes what you should say, and what you may not say. Underground prohibited materials were known as samizdat. Improper speech was seen as a "threat" or a "harm" to others, who formed the communist state; those who violated the prescribed worldview or contradicted enforced "norms" were punished, exiled, or killed.
Today: offensiveness, codes of conduct, community "standards", suggested phrase "replacements"
The Majority Must Be A Dictatorship
In contrast to the Western liberal idea of plurality and individual sovereignty, the central doctrine of communist thought is the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. What most people think, or all people are assumed to think, rules everyone else; the workers hold power over the means of production, rather than a small elite (Dictatorship of the Bourgeoisie). To safeguard being "re-conquered", the proletariat must rule by force.
Today: any Left-leaning party in existence
Officialised Truth Should Only Come From One Party
Control in the USSR was entirely based on the control of information, which was dammed to exclusively flow from State-approved sources. Crucial to this was the existence of one source of truth, or the slandering of other sources as dishonest. Pravda ("truth") was established as the opposite of journalism.
Today: political fact checkers, anti-hate watchdog groups
Dissenters Have Medical Psychopathologies
Anti-Soviet beliefs and behaviour - later even possession of banned materials - were correlated with mental illness in the USSR. Those charged with violating Article 70 of the RSFSR Criminal Code had their beliefs characterised as a criminal offence, for which they were incarcerated in psychiatric hospitals or exiled to camps.
Today: homophobia, transphobia, conspiracy theorist, climate-denier, anti-vaxx
Workplaces Should Have Political Enforcers
Originating in the French Revolution, a Political Commissar in the USSR - and China - has the job of ensuring workers stay true to the political doctrine they labour under. They are a supervisory officer responsible for the political education (ideology) and organization of the unit they are assigned to.
Today: Human Resources, "Head of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion", "Chief Impact Officer", corporate "policies"
Partisan Media Should Unify To "Help" The "Right" Candidate And Suppress "Dangerous" Views
In the USSR, the existence of media was to provide the information to the population required to "cohere" an "unshakable" Marxist society. The threat of fascism and "temptations" of capitalism were censored and suppressed in order that the "correct" viewpoint and technocrats remained at the helm. Glavlit and Goskomizdat controlled entirely what anyone saw or read, which was only what the Party designed. The faceless NPC bureaucrats who carried out the Party's river of propaganda were called apparatchiks.
Today: CNN, NBC, ABC, Comedy Central, MTV, Guardian, New York Times, Washington Post, NPR, BBC, Vox, Vice, Mother Jones etc
"Hate Speech" Must Be Banished
The origin of "hate speech" as a USSR invention which can be traced back to the drafting of Article 20 of the United Nations' 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Representatives from the USSR fought to broaden the definition of suppressable speech to include "fascism", which they defined de facto as "anything anti-communist". "Hate" was essentially criticism of communism.
Today: Hate Crimes, Hate Speech laws, "non-crime hate incidents"
Manufacturing Should Be Transferred
This one is straight out of Marx: the means of production, i.e. physical manufacturing, or production of the "necessities of life", is the fulcrum of power and driver of change in historical materialism, accelerating capitalist countries to the transition towards socialism and communism. The most powerful communist country now controls the West's means of production.
Today: outsourcing manufacturing to China and India
Propaganda And Education Are The Same
In Peter Kenez's "The Birth of the Propaganda State," the Bolsheviks didn't see any difference between education and propaganda. To be educated in their eyes was to absorb the tenets of Marxism-Leninism — from the primacy of materialism, the depredation of capital and the inevitability of class struggle. Gramsci declared the Long March Through the Institutions had to start in the education system.
Today: Critical Pedagogy, Howard Zinn, 1619 Project, classroom revisionism, "personal and social education"
Medicine & Science Should Be Used For Desirable Political Ends
Lysenkoism, or "New Biology" was a disastrous program through the 1930-50s by propagandized "genius" Trofim Lysenko. 3,000 scientists were dismissed, imprisoned, or murdered to entertain his claims of a new "agricultural revolution". His ideas were taught as the "only correct theory" and anyone who disagreed was denounced and smeared as "fascist".
Today: trans rights, lockdowns, fearmongering, non-scientific mask/vaccination mandates
Western Countries Are Imperalist Aggressors
In 1917, Lenin wrote "Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism" in which he linked capitalism to colonial empires raiding poorer countries, and the "late" stage of "fascism" giving birth to socialism. The same demented ideas were used by the Soviets to propagandize the USSR as a "peaceful" nation, and by Herbert Marcuse to radicalise anti-Vietnam students into avoiding the draft.
Today: Stop The War Coalition, Pro-Palestine groups
Everyone Must Have Their Share
Stalin adopted many "five year plans", but the first in 1925 was to forcibly seize (expropriate/alienate) farms from individual property owners to put them under state control, which was known as "collectivization". Millions of wealthier peasant farmers - Kulaks - were demonised as "class enemies" who were deported and murdered.
Today: reparations, "equity"
Partisan Councils and Committees Should Adjudicate Concerns
Show-trials and investigations by supposedly "independent" committees have a long and rich history. In communist society, the Party Congress elects a Central Committee, which appoints the executive political bureau (Politburo) and General Secretary. Every unit of society is subservient to the Party and its ideology; no-one disagrees. A violation of the simple principle nemo iudex in causa sua: "no-one is judge in his own cause".
Today: Facebook "Oversight Board", Big tech "moderation", "Trust & Safety" teams, banning "appeals"
Unacceptable People Must Not Be Heard From
Erasing people from books and photographs after they died as a form of "social memory murder" was a favourite tactic of Joseph Stalin. Examples include Leon Trotsky, John Paul Jones, and Nikolai Antipov. The concept was borrowed by far-left UK activist groups who demanded "no platform" for "fascists" on 1970s university campuses, at the same time as Herbert Marcuse published his argument for suppressing anything right-wing in "Repressive Tolerance".
Today: University/Big Tech disinvitations, deplatforming, banning; newspaper staff exile
Politicised Figures Should Be Canonised
The "cult of personality" dynamic so evident in Russian history of course stems back to Lenin and Stalin. With the absence of religion in the Utopia, sainthood was equated by heroism - opposition to the “evil” communism was against, ordinary people's longings were fulfilled with the lionising deification of uncompromising, "rebellious" Marxist figures such as Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, and Mao Zedong. Those who fell became "martyrs".
Today: Xi Jingping, Greta Thunberg, George Floyd
Some Groups Have "Privilege" Others Don't Enjoy
"Privilege" is a charge originating in the Leninist era made against "class enemies" in order to stir up resentment and violence from the ordinary population. Most infamously levelled against the Kulaks (rich farmers) who were "exposed" by Pravda, of whom 5 million were "liquidated" on account of their comparative wealth.
Today: Critical Race Theory, feminist misandry
Zionism Is A Conspiratorial Aggression That Must Be Opposed
Although Lenin infamously countered antisemitic Russian dictates, Jews were required to adhere to Marxism: their properties, temples, and communities were shut down, and their artists and academics suffered the same fate of expulsion and execution. Under Stalin, "rootless cosmopolitan" became a slur for the "jew" who helped "American Imperialism" and "anti-Zionism" became the fashionable term for anti-Semitic.
Today: "Anti-Zionism", Labour party abuse, Critical Race Theory
The Danger of Not Teaching History's Warnings
Politicians are simple creatures: they climb the greasy pole by parroting back to the electorate what they want to hear. When their messaging revolves around society's craziest 15% during their time spent in an electronic echo chamber (Twitter), things go very wrong.
Much of what is being promoted culturally can actually be attributed to stupidity, rather than malice. There are the Angela Davis types, of course, but many of them simply don't have any real understanding of anything. It sounds fashionable, so they give it a new name. They don't think they'll actually reach their goal, so it's more fun to watch the flames.
The truly stupid completely wilfully ignore the horror. Students at UCL in London in the last few years were claiming gulags were a Westernised myth of prison labour camps. But it's fashionable, whereas Holocaust or Holodomor denial isn't.
If anything, the regurgitation of Soviet "ideas" points to a much more alarming notion: the total creative bankruptcy of our leaders.
Universities produce our knowledge and those leaders. Professors work on what catches their imagination, and are tasked with sparking their students' imaginations. The 60s students - the class of 68 - grew infatuated with the alternative, rebellious, counter-revolutionary ideal of the USSR and its allies, who sold them a nonsense dream to cover up the truth of what they were doing. Even now, they still dream it.
Their students, Big Tech, buy into those dreams as fact; helped along by zealous omission and suppression of information in loyalty to the same communist ideal. Their teachers were wannabe teachers living out a new religion in the hope they'd get to move there some day.
They got conned.
They should have been charged as traitors.
The KGB certainly thought of them like that.
"The result? The result you can see. Most of the people who (reeducated) in the sixties, drop outs or half-baked intellectuals are now occupying the positions of power in the Government, civil service, business, mass media, educational system. You are stuck with them. You cannot get rid of them. They are contaminated, They are programmed to think and react to certain stimuli in a certain pattern. You cannot change their mind even if you expose them to authentic information, even if you prove that white is white and black is black you still cannot change the basic perception and illogical behavior. In other words, these people, the process of demoralization is complete and irreversible. To get rid society of these people you need another twenty or fifteen years to educate a new generation of patriotically-minded and commonsense people who would be acting in favor and in the interests of the United States society."
