“Stalin’s dictatorship, too would be expected
to foster ‘a permanent condition of stress by creating enemies at home and
abroad and/or by imposing upon the population gigantic tasks that would be
unlikely to be carried out in the absence of the dictatorship’ as well as, ‘a
charismatic image of the dictator,’ ‘a utopian goal, carefully kept in a remote
future’ and ‘proscription of any deviating values, supported by threats and
acts of repression.’”
Observations
and reflections of seemingly no relevance to your daily comings and goings jump
out at you sometimes and make a strong, unexpected connection to your
unrelenting, consuming nightmares. Jumping out at me was the above reflection
on Stalin’s dictatorship from a new biography by the prolific historian of the
Soviet era, Stephen Kotkin. So, how does a long dead, mass-murdering Bolshevik
connect to twenty-first century American politics now in a constant, wild
frenzy over one of its most bizarre of improbabilities, a TV-reality show star
and former real estate mogul with gorgeous wife numero tres sitting in the White House?
The
closest we have gotten to a “charismatic image of the dictator” in recent times
might have been the cult of personality that enveloped candidate Barack Obama,
The One, in 2008 replete with fainting maidens at his rallies, God-comparisons
by serious journalists, and fake Greek columns for the backdrops of his
speeches. Obama’s “healing the planet” magic was sustained for a season by the massive
collective sycophancy composed of the media establishment, the entertainment
industry and academia. The cult of Obama, however, was a celebrity cult and
Americans in their embrace of celebrities are, if nothing else, a fickle lot.
Obama is now (at least for the time being), past tense, the mystic, Oprah, the
current fashionable buzz. For better or
worse, we have, as they say, moved on, and whatever one might care to say about
Donald Trump, “charismatic” is not what first jumps to mind.
What
strikes so close to home about Kotkin’s comments on Stalin’s rule is his noting
of “a permanent condition of stress by creating enemies at home or abroad….” It is safe to say, I believe, that “a
permanent condition of stress” captures what so many of us now feel as we
endure the daily irruptions of ideological warfare increasingly infused with the
language of apocalypse and the denunciation of yet another enemy of “our
democracy.” Nancy Pelosi, of the recent Republican tax bill, intoned, “It
is the end of the world… The debate on health care is life/death… This is
Armageddon.” In the head of this cognitively impaired septuagenarian,
predicting how the levers move to arrange her thoughts might be an entertaining
exercise, but she cannot possibly believe this. No one believes it, but
American politics has descended into untrammeled tribal warfare, and warfare is
all about friends and enemies. Obama let it slip out in a 2010 Univision
interview, dropping his ‘g’s in order to
sound less like a President and more like a mob boss, “We’re gonna punish our enemies, and we’re gonna reward our friends.”
Obama, however, had stumbled on to something: enemies exist to be punished;
that’s the whole point, and when you practice politics as warfare, that’s the
only rule.
The existence of these enemies Obama
had put in his sights for punishment, I would suggest, is what makes our “permanent
condition of stress” permanent. Moreover, it should be obvious that, whatever
the particular threats political enemies might exude, persistence and endurance
are of the highest importance, in a word, permanence. A completely vanquished
enemy is no longer an enemy, and without him, the status-quo with all of its
limitations and imperfections conveniently ascribed to his wiles, belongs entirely
to the victor, an undisputed but tainted possession, however, that does not work
completely to his advantage. On our enemies, we depend for our longevity more,
perhaps, than on our friends.
Stalin was extremely fortunate in
the early stages of his dictatorship to have had Hitler and Mussolini as his
enemies. The racial and national superiority claimed by the Nazis and Fascists and
their affinity for violence and military aggression made them the perfect foil
for the Soviet’s phony “peace” propaganda and the promise of humanity’s
revolutionary march of progress toward a world of equality, harmony and plenty
and a socialist workers paradise. The Soviets were the “progressives” of the
1930s; they had divined the arc of the moral universe bending toward justice and
were, in stark contrast to the Nazis, bending right along with it. Though Nazi
Germany was militarily vanquished by Stalin (with massive assistance from the
capitalist powers he had vowed to destroy) the imagery of fascism was embraced
by the Soviets up to its collapse in 1991 to define its enemies, including its
primary cold war enemy, the United States.
Who then are the enemies that now
foster this “permanent state of stress” that seems to plague American politics?
These are “enemies within,” those who oppose or are indifferent to the coercive
moralism of the self-proclaimed “progressives” who now own the Democrat party.
These enemies, in continuity with practice of the Soviet-era progressives, employing
the ominous swastika-blackshirt imagery of the 1930s, continue to be smeared as
fascists; “fascism” meaning opposition or resistance to progress. Only moral
defectives and mental pigmies can be against progress which is why “fascist”
rolls so effortlessly off the tongue of a progressive whenever he encounters
someone not of his ilk.
Progress, however, is conveniently
and hopelessly abstract and remains always an elusive goal, one, as noted in
Kotkin’s observation above, “that is carefully kept in the remote future.” The
future is never where we are at, and thus it serves to defer accountability for
current failure and as the ideological fulcrum to justify the application of
whatever force is necessary to prepare everyone for arrival, someday, at that
morally pristine destination of perfect equality, progressivism’s ruling motif.
All progressives, whether of the 1930s Bolshevik-genre or 21st
century American social justice warriors, are enthusiasts for coercion, since
not everyone comprehends their current fallen state and only those who are
willing to submit to the purification rituals get to continue moving toward the
promise land. Those who do not are, as Hillary Clinton put it so bluntly during
her 2016 Presidential campaign, “irredeemable.”
With the shift of a few electoral votes, the future for anyone belonging to
this class, would have looked even less promising. When you have the power, what
exactly will you do to a large, intractable class of irredeemables that will
not involve massive coercion? Hillary’s irredeemables would have felt her
revenge; a bit like Stalin’s kulaks
of the 1930s.
For today’s progressives, so enthralled
with the promises of Obama and now in desperate “resistance” to President
Trump, their “friends” and “enemies” no longer break out into Bolshevik-theorized
hostile classes (oppressed-proletariat versus
oppressor-capitalist) but into racial tribes (oppressed-people of color versus white-oppressors). The vehicle of
this relationship is racism, and it is barely an exaggeration to say that twenty
minutes cannot pass without Americans being reminded by some angry or
condescending “authority” from the chattering classes what a racist society
they live in. They watch the mobs assault historical monuments, benignly
regarded for hundreds of years, now proclaimed “racist.” Speech that does not
conform to the standards set by self-proclaimed victims of racial
discrimination and oppression is proscribed as “hate speech,” and harassment
and banishment meted out to the transgressors. Whiteness and white-privilege
are officially the marks of moral turpitude and require the bearers to undergo
confessional “struggle
sessions” reminiscent of the Mao’s Red Guard in action during the
Cultural Revolution.
Racism, Obama revealed to us late in
his Presidency, is “still
part of our DNA that's passed on. We're not cured of it.”
This was not good news, at least for some of us “folks.” Translated into
practical-political terms this means that racists are here for the duration,
enemies, you might say, of a permanent nature. What punishment might be in
store for them is a matter of grim speculation. Obama’s metaphor of the “cure,”
clearly, is a euphemism that barely conceals the growing hostility and
resentment for the heritage and traditions of white European America and the
determination to erase them.
There was no push back on Obama’s
“diagnosis” from any notable within our culture shaping institutions. Indeed,
this seems to be the received, state-enforced wisdom, the foundation of the ruling
orthodoxy, and so once again Kotkin’s text on Stalin’s last-century
terror-state bears out a certain resemblance to the descent of 21st
century American politics into a soft dictatorship. We now, as did the Russians
in the 1930s, face the “proscription of any deviating values,
supported by threats and acts of repression.” The dictatorship we live
under today has no mustachiod, grey tunic-wearing party General Secretary who personally
sets the standards for “correct” thinking enforced by an elaborate apparatus of
state-terror. The proscription and repression for us is of a different more
insidious, sophisticated order. Instead, we have a hoard of mini-Stalins
(race-careerists, political opportunists, left-wing globalists, and cultural
Marxists) throughout the land sniffing into every corner of American society
for any scent of racism. The American-Stalinist orthodoxy is the judgment that racism,
the defining core of American history, dominates every aspect of its social
order. Redemption comes only by remaking America into a multicultural rainbow that
reflects the diversity of the planet. This is not a debatable proposition: to
raise questions or doubts is a high-risk enterprise. Your career can be
destroyed, Nobel prize winning geneticist, James Watson, for example, for publishing
research on race and IQ. You cannot speak and may be assaulted on a university
campus if your views on race related matters do not meet official approval, Charles Murray and his faculty escort, for
example, at Middlebury College last year. Professional advancement, academic
respectability, social approval and mobility, all rest heavily on conformity to
the affirmations of the fixed faith.
In
government, the mini-Stalins busy themselves opening the borders to millions of
third world people and denouncing as “racist” Americans who resent not only the
financial and social burdens they impose, but also fear the loss of their
culture and heritage. The journalists and media advocacy-functionaries, perform
Pravda-like, rewarded for their fawning with access to corridors of power. From
the corrupt, dissolute entertainment industry, we are subjected to productions
of obscenity-laced nihilism and a steady barrage of barely
disguised works of leftwing agitprop. Little-Stalins infest the workplace as
sensitivity enforcers policing such things as the use of gender pronouns, searching
for micro-aggressions, expanding the world of victims whose feelings require
constant protection from the bigots who fail to grasp the imperatives of
diversity and inclusion.
In this dictatorship that the
overlords continue, laughingly, to call “our democracy,” we – white, European,
Christian Americans – are the enemy, the permanent enemy. Apologies for slavery
and racism and copious confessions of white privilege will not change that. Reparations
will not change that. Diversity indoctrination, sensitivity training and
absorbing more lectures on tolerance will not make us less toxic. Reverence and
worship of Martin Luther King and attendance at MLK prayer breakfasts will make
no difference, will impress no one and will not diminish the hostility and
rancor held against us. Nothing we say or do will make “whiteness” other than a
permanent moral stain. The first practical order is to stop pretending
otherwise and collaborating with the engineers of our destruction. What comes
next should be obvious.
