The Cold War
Published 22 Jun 2020Our historical documentary series on the history of the Cold War continues with a video on the famous Cambridge Five and Donald Maclean in particular — a real Cold War-era spy story
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Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 7 Aug 2020Keep safe and stylish with a Red-And-Blue facemask from Volante Design, or DONATE to help students in public schools receive high-quality masks for free — https://bit.ly/2DwE9O7
August of 2020 marks the 75th anniversary of the end of the Second World War. So I wanted to make a video about that. That was a bad idea…
What do you get when a Classically-Minded historian ventures about 2,000 years outside of their comfort zone? A mess. A well-intentioned mess is what you get. BUT a mess that we can learn from! So join me as we dig into the aftermath of the Second World War to analyze the origins of the Cold War and the decolonization of European Empires.
SOURCES & Further Reading: The Cold War by Gaddis, The Wars of French Decolonization by Clayton, British decolonization, 1946-1997 by McIntyre, The Cold War’s Killing Fields by Chamberlin, The Cold War: A Very Short Introduction by McMahon, and “Crash Course European History [Parts 42-47]” by Green.
This video was edited by Sophia Ricciardi AKA “Indigo”. https://www.sophiakricci.com/
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From the comments:
Overly Sarcastic Productions
1 hour ago (edited)
Some clarifications:
North Africa did of course see conflict, the Pacific did get occupied — even the places that didn’t (eg: India) still paid for the war. Damn double-negatives.That weird Romania-Hungary-Russia border is a holdover from WWII. The border lasted until 1946 and was changed in 1947. Later in the video you’ll see the more familiar borders.
Indonesia declared Independence in 1945 (Like Vietnam), but the Netherlands didn’t withdraw until 1949, hence my mention of ’49.
World War Two
Published 6 Aug 2020George Orwell is one of the most famous English writers in the modern age. But how did he become the man who would coin so many of the words we still use in our political debates?
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Source list: http://bit.ly/WW2sourcesHosted by: Indy Neidell
Written by: Rune Væver Hartvig
Director: Astrid Deinhard
Producers: Astrid Deinhard and Spartacus Olsson
Executive Producers: Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson, Bodo Rittenauer
Creative Producer: Joram Appel
Post-Production Director: Wieke Kapteijns
Research by: Rune Væver Hartvig
Edited by: Mikołaj Cackowski
Sound design: Marek Kamiński
Map animations: Eastory (https://www.youtube.com/c/eastory)Colorizations by:
Cassowary https://www.flickr.com/photos/cassowa…
Klimbim https://www.flickr.com/photos/2215569…Sources:
Wellcome Images V0014461
Bundesarchiv
Narodowe Archiwum Cyfrowe
From the Noun Project: Pig by supalerk laipawat, Horse by supalerk laipawat, Goat by Laymik, Sheep by Laymik, Cow by supalerk laipawat, Chicken by supalerk laipawat, Farmer by Symbolon, Podium by Focus LabSoundtracks from the Epidemic Sound:
Howard Harper-Barnes – “London”
Johannes Bornlof – “Deviation In Time”
Johannes Bornlof – “The Inspector 4”
Skrya – “First Responders”
Jo Wandrini – “Puzzle Of Complexity”Archive by Screenocean/Reuters https://www.screenocean.com.
A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.
The Cynical Historian
Published 1 Nov 2018Today let’s talk about Marxist historians. Edward Palmer Thompson makes perhaps the best introduction to the realm of Marxist history. His work on the English Labor Class, allows for a better understanding of the Marxist project, and how understanding class consciousness can lead to revolution.
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references:
Beard, Charles. “Written History as an act of Faith”, The American Historical Review 39, no. 2 (January 1934), 219-231.Marx, Karl. The Essential Marx. ed. Leon Trotsky, abridgment of Das Kapital, Vol. I. 1939; Mineola, N.York: Dover Publications, 2006. https://amzn.to/2MWygco
Thompson, E.P. “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century”, Past and Present, No. 50 (Feb., 1971), 76-136.
Thompson, E.P. The Making of the English Working Class. New York: Pantheon Books, 1963. https://amzn.to/2KFSESC
Special thanks to Dr. Colleen Hall-Patton for proofreading the script for this episode.
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Wiki:
Edward Palmer Thompson (3 February 1924 – 28 August 1993), usually cited as E. P. Thompson, was a British historian, writer, socialist and peace campaigner. He is probably best known today for his historical work on the British radical movements in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, in particular The Making of the English Working Class (1963). He also published influential biographies of William Morris (1955) and (posthumously) William Blake (1993) and was a prolific journalist and essayist. He also published the novel The Sykaos Papers and a collection of poetry. His work is considered to have been among the most important contributions to labour history and social history in the latter twentieth-century, with a global impact, including on scholarship in Asia and Africa.Thompson was one of the principal intellectuals of the Communist Party in Great Britain. Although he left the party in 1956 over the Soviet invasion of Hungary, he nevertheless remained a “historian in the Marxist tradition”, calling for a rebellion against Stalinism as a prerequisite for the restoration of communists’ “confidence in our own revolutionary perspectives”. Thompson played a key role in the first New Left in Britain in the late 1950s. He was a vociferous left-wing socialist critic of the Labour governments of 1964–70 and 1974–79, and an early and constant supporter of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, becoming during the 1980s the leading intellectual light of the movement against nuclear weapons in Europe.
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Hashtags: #History #Marx #EPThompson #ClassConsiousness #Materialism #TheMakingOfTheEnglishWorkingClass
Francis X. Maier makes the case that the Holodomor — the Soviet Union’s deliberate starvation of millions of its own people in Ukraine and surrounding regions — killed even more than the better-known Nazi Holocaust, then identifies one of the key apologists who lied serially and deliberately to hide the genocide:
A page from the Chicago Herald and Examiner from 3 March, 1935.
Wikimedia Commons.
[S.J.] Taylor’s 1990 article was timed to the release of Stalin’s Apologist, her withering biography of journalist Walter Duranty. A Pulitzer Prize winner, celebrated political analyst, and Moscow correspondent for the New York Times during the 1930s, Duranty interviewed Stalin twice. He also played a significant role in securing American diplomatic recognition for the Soviet regime. Less publicly, he was a prodigious womanizer, longtime opium buddy of Satanist Aleister Crowley, compulsive exploiter of friends, a spendthrift, occasional drunk, and an inventive, always-reliable flack for the Soviet regime.
One of Duranty’s lifelong memories involved his religious grandmother who, after catching the adolescent Duranty in a lie, had warned him that “liars go to hell.” He never forgot or forgave the correction. As an adult, he simply erased all family ties and falsely claimed in his autobiography that he’d been orphaned at age ten. Massaging the truth became one of his core skills. Brilliant, engaging, and widely respected at the time, he was, in the words of Malcolm Muggeridge, who also reported from Moscow and saw Duranty in action, “the greatest liar of any journalist I have met in 50 years of journalism.”
Committed to protecting his own influence and to a future “greater good” promised by the Soviet regime, Duranty at first dismissed rumors of the Ukrainian Famine. Then he downplayed them. Then he claimed that Ukraine’s “food shortages” were the result of local mismanagement and the work of “wreckers” and “spoilers” intent on undermining Soviet progress. He repeatedly denied the mass starvation in his reporting. But he did suggest that “you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs” … especially when the omelet is the task of modernization, and the cooks are tough-minded Bolsheviks intent on a better tomorrow.
As Taylor notes in her book, Western powers struggling with the Great Depression and the rise of Hitler in Germany had little interest in rumors from Ukraine that might antagonize Stalin as a potential ally. Muggeridge had arrived in Russia in 1932 to string for the Manchester Guardian. A convinced socialist at the time, he intended to stay in Russia and renounce his British passport for Soviet citizenship. Reality interfered. By March 1933, he was reporting on Ukraine’s famine as “one of the most monstrous crimes in history,” and his disillusionment with the Soviet paradise was complete. But back in England, thanks in part to Duranty’s counter-reporting and Soviet propaganda, Muggeridge’s work was dismissed as “a hysterical tirade.” Muggeridge himself was slandered, vilified, and unable to find employment. And that might have buried the Holodomor story successfully, except for one man.
Welshman Gareth Jones was a young Russian Studies graduate of Cambridge and a former secretary to British Prime Minister Lloyd George. Stringing for the same Manchester Guardian as Muggeridge, he eluded Soviet press controls and spent three weeks on his own, walking through the hellish conditions of a starvation-ravaged Ukraine. Then he wrote about it in the spring of 1933, confirming and compounding the impact of Muggeridge’s recent work. Walter Duranty led the ferocious, Soviet-prodded attack on Jones’s credibility. He also bullied most other Moscow-based Western journalists — to their enduring disgrace — into doing the same, lest they lose their visas. Jones, however, had a spine. He did not back off. He continued writing and speaking about the famine in Ukraine with lasting effect, until his death under suspicious circumstances two years later.
China has been quickly adding capabilities and hulls to the PLAN, but a relatively recent change to how larger naval ship command is structured may be a throwback to Soviet Union practices:
China’s Type 001A aircraft carrier shortly after launch, 17 August 2017.
Photo via Wikimedia Commons
When dealing with Chinese navy or coast guard ships, foreign naval commanders have learned to take into account the dual command structure of Chinese crews. In effect, Chinese warships except for smaller (less than 2,000 tons) ones, have dual commanders and a naval command system that is more premeditated and slower to respond to unexpected conditions.
This comes as a surprise to many Western naval officers. Although the Chinese military has achieved many visible signs of modernizing, like new weapons, equipment, uniforms, tactics and officer training, it is still having problems in several key areas. When it comes to leadership there are problems with the political officers.
The Chinese long ago borrowed the concept of the political officer (“Zampolit“) from the Soviet Union. The political officer represents the Communist Party and has the authority to overrule any order a military commander gives. In reality, the political officer usually acts as a combined morale and special events officer. The political officers are primarily responsible for preventing anything happening in their unit that would embarrass the party. For naval zampolits that meant watching out for signs of mutiny or sailors planning to seek asylum in a foreign port.
Unlike the Russian naval zampolit, the Chinese counterpart, called a political commissar is considered the equal of the regular naval commander and his superior when it comes to a “special mission”, like deliberately harassing foreign warships or opening fire on anyone. The political commissar is the same rank as the ship captain and can overrule the ship commander at any time and in any situation. It was not always that way.
An important change took place in 2018 when naval political commissars were given equal authority with the captain as “mission commander” and is expected to replace the captain if the captain is disabled by injury or sickness. The normal second-in-command (the XO or executive officer) becomes the XO for the political commissar and the captain and third, not second, in command. The practical problem with this is that the captain and XO have spent their entire careers (fifteen or more years) learning how to run a ship and supervise the crew. In contrast, the political commissar learned enough tech stuff to be more annoying. The political commissar was a professional busybody, scold and snitch. The political commissar can end the career of the captain, XO or any other officer by simply making a series of uncomplimentary reports.
The 2018 change was part of a program that began in 2016 throughout the military as the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) sought to improve its control over the military. In the navy that meant the political commissar had the ultimate responsibility for achieving goals assigned to a ship. The captain is not the true commander of the ship in the Western sense. He is there to see that technical details are well taken care of and that would include taking change during very bad weather or some kind of technical (fire, explosion) problem aboard ship. The political commissar is expected to personally undertake particularly dangerous leadership missions, although only those he is qualified to deal with. That means political commissars have led boarding parties in dangerous situations but not entrusted with command during damage control situations.
The full impact of the 2016-18 “reforms” to improve CCP control of the military are still working themselves out in the navy. Western, especially American, captains are being warned that their Chinese counterparts will probably not react as quickly to an emergency or unexpected situation that that should be taken into account, or taken advantage of.
World War Two
Published 14 Jul 2020When the German armed forces invade the USSR, they come with an order to exterminate from Hitler. Now the defending Soviet armed forces receive similar orders from Stalin. The bloodshed that follows defies human imagination.
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Written by: Spartacus Olsson and Joram Appel
Director: Astrid Deinhard
Producers: Astrid Deinhard and Spartacus Olsson
Executive Producers: Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson, Bodo Rittenauer
Creative Producer: Joram Appel
Post-Production Director: Wieke Kapteijns
Research by: Joram Appel and Spartacus Olsson
Edited by: Mikołaj Cackowski
Sound design: Marek Kamiński
Map animations: Eastory (https://www.youtube.com/c/eastory)Colorizations by:
Julius Jääskeläinen – https://www.facebook.com/JJcolorization/
Jaris Almazani (Artistic Man) – https://instagram.com/artistic.man?ig…
Klimbim – https://www.flickr.com/photos/2215569…Sources:
Bundesarchiv
Yad Vashem 55AO6, 145CO2, 142GO5, 1019/2, 5648/40, 143EO1, 5648/39, 73BO2, 74FO7, 2725/17, 1564/2, 4360/49, 90DO9, 90DO8, 1278/19, 112GO7, 97GO2, 1597/11, 145CO1, 80DO5, 145AO, 5138/95
USHMM
Vilna Gaon State Jewish MuseumSoundtracks from the Epidemic Sound:
Skrya – “First Responders”
Philip Ayers – “Trapped in a Maze”
Farrell Wooten – “Mystery Minutes”
Cobby Costa – “From the Past”
Cobby Costa – “Flight Path”
Gunnar Johnsen – “Not Safe Yet”
Farrell Wooten – “Blunt Object”
Fluow – “Endlessness”
Jon Bjork – “Icicles”
Jon Bjork – “For the Many”Archive by Screenocean/Reuters https://www.screenocean.com.
A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.
From the comments:
World War Two
8 hours ago (edited)
However hard it is to watch this horror, it’s important that we document it, and learn from it. Each and everyone of us can, and we must for the sake of ourselves and our fellow human beings do so. The steps that led the people involved in these atrocities to this point were small, sometimes innocent, or at least uninformed decisions that took many years to reach this level of inhumanity. It starts with denying facts, imagining conspiracies as the root of your own problems, and demonizing your imagined enemies. In this void you are already on a slippery slope that may lead into the abyss. On that note, the events depicted here are based on solid research, and verified sources that are irrefutable. Wherever there is uncertainty, we have mentioned it. The purpose of this documentation is neither to scapegoat any one side, nor exonerate anyone from blame. These are the facts. This is what happened. Think about that, because the perpetrators here were like us, they didn’t come out of their mother’s womb with the intent to torture and murder anyone. And the victims were also like all of us, ordinary people just trying to get on with their lives according to their best ability. They had dreams and goals in life, some of them political perhaps, but mostly they just got on with their everyday life, banal and difficult as that might be, until they ended up in the hands of someone who had learnt to hate them without even knowing them. Remember that – this could have been anyone of us, on both sides of the events. To have that humility is the beginning of a journey to do good.Spartacus
PS. and if you wonder how we put up with making this kind of content; it’s difficult. I cried bitterly after recording this, and tears still well up when I think about it. While we write it’s easier to turn off, switch on the coping mechanisms, pretend that its just absurd facts and numbers. But when you act out the words… that what defies imagination is suddenly horribly real.
The Great War
Published 11 Jul 2020Sign up for Curiosity Stream and get Nebula bundled in: https://curiositystream.com/thegreatwar
The summer of 1920 was marked by escalating tensions on the borders of the German Reich. In the Rhineland, a neutral zone per the Versailles Treaty, the revolutionary uprising after the failed Kapp Putsch was put down with the help of the army and the Freikorps. In Upper Silesia, the conflict between Poland and Germany was escalating into a proxy war. And all that while the German government was negotiating the payments of reparations at the Spa Conference.
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*Buying via this link supports The Great War (Affiliate-Link)» SOURCES
Buat, Edmond. 8 (Perrin, 2015)
Beaupré, Nicolas. Occuper l’Allemagne après 1918 (Revue historique des armées, 2009)
Böhler, Jochen. Civil War in Central Europe, 1918-1921 (Oxford University Press, 2019)
Gietinger, Klaus. Kapp-Putsch (Stuttgart: Schmetterling, 2020)
le Naour, Jean Yves. La Honte Noire (Hachette, 2004)
Le Figaro, numéro du 8 avril 1920 (via Gallica)
Stengers, Jean. L’accord militaire franco-belge de 1920 et le Luxembourg (Revue belge de de Philologie et d’Histoire, 2004)
https://www.dhm.de/lemo/jahreschronik…
Pöppinghege, Rainer: Republik im Bürgerkrieg. Kapp-Putsch und Gegenbewegung an Ruhr und Lippe 1919/1920 (2019)
van Galen Last, Dick. Des soldats noirs dans une guerre de blancs (1914-1922): une histoire mondiale (Editions de l’Université de Bruxelles, 2015)» MORE THE GREAT WAR
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Presented by: Jesse Alexander
Written by: Jesse Alexander
Director: Toni Steller & Florian Wittig
Director of Photography: Toni Steller
Sound: Toni Steller
Editing: Toni Steller
Motion Design: Philipp Appelt
Mixing, Mastering & Sound Design: http://above-zero.com
Maps: Daniel Kogosov (https://www.patreon.com/Zalezsky)
Research by: Jesse Alexander
Fact checking: Florian WittigChannel Design: Alexander Clark
Original Logo: David van StepholdContains licensed material by getty images
All rights reserved – Real Time History GmbH 2020
David Warren discusses an intractable “problem”:
I do not suppose it makes any practical difference what I have to say about a public health problem that invades the lives of billions; nor that readers will take me for a reliable epidemiologist when I say that the worst danger of that Batflu has now passed. (Infection rates spike, but the power of the virus to torture and kill has relented. The death rates continue downward.)
Nevertheless, I think there is some value in stating, even restating, the obvious — when what is obvious is in conflict with sensational reports, and the aggressive distortions of mass media, profiting from panic.
This Batflu became — more than any previous epidemic — a political issue, instantaneously. This is evident in the way it was spread, quite intentionally, by the Communist Party of China. (They shut down everything in Wuhan, except flights to Europe and America.) In all countries with democratic institutions, the disease became the centre of political attention, and unprecedented lockdowns were ordered. Likewise, unprecedented schemes of surveillance have significantly changed the relation between governments and governed, entirely for the worse. By means of current technology, the former will be able to perpetuate these changes, leaving those who wish to recover old liberties nowhere to hide.
Moreover, this is done by public demand. “The peeple” are easy to manipulate, once they have been frightened. The great majority of men, now and through the past, never cared about freedom. It has always been a minority concern, “for the intellectuals.” The “silent majority” will take their freedom, but only after their comfort and safety have been assured. The right to choose among consumer products is enough for them.
There are revolutions, such as the one that is now being attempted by the Left, but these never last. Either they are extinguished, under the wet blanket of public apathy, or the revolutionists succeed in installing a truly monstrous regime. Only thus, can they prolong their evil. Two generations of half-educated, indoctrinated, university grads favour a doctrinal dictatorship. Those still young are full of malign energy.
The Great War
Published 27 Jun 2020Sign up for Curiosity Stream and get Nebula bundled in: https://curiositystream.com/thegreatwar
Freeing peasants and workers from oppression was one of the main messages of the Bolsheviks. The peasants in the countryside were happy to get rid of the landowning class and supported socialist ideas of land reform but once the Bolsheviks turned to “War Communism” to maintain their power against the Whites and other forces, the reluctant support of the peasants dropped — and in 1920 they turned to open revolt.
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Figes, Orlando. A People’s Tragedy. The Russian Revolution (London: The Bodley Head, 2017 [1996]).
Mawdsley, Evan. The Russian Civil War (New York: Pegasus Books, 2005).
Smele, Jonathan. The “Russian” Civil Wars 1916-1926 (London: Hurst, 2015).
Sumpf, Alexandre. “Russian Civil War,” in 1914-1918 online. International Encyclopedia of the First World War. https://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.
Engelstein, Laura. Russia in Flames (Oxford University Press, 2017).
Wolf, Eric R. Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century (New York: Harper, 1969)» SOCIAL MEDIA
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Presented by: Jesse Alexander
Written by: Jesse Alexander
Director: Toni Steller & Florian Wittig
Director of Photography: Toni Steller
Sound: Toni Steller
Editing: Toni Steller
Mixing, Mastering & Sound Design: http://above-zero.com
Maps: Daniel Kogosov (https://www.patreon.com/Zalezsky)
Research by: Jesse Alexander
Fact checking: Florian WittigChannel Design: Alexander Clark
Original Logo: David van StepholdContains licensed material by getty images
All rights reserved – Real Time History GmbH 2020
World War Two
Published 19 Jun 2020The future looks bright for soviet women in the 1910s, they have the right to vote and they’re on track for social emancipation. Yet this doesn’t last long. Soon, the demands of the nation will rob them of these promises.
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Between 2 Wars: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list…
Source list: http://bit.ly/WW2sourcesHosted by: Anna Deinhard
Written by: Isabel Wilson
Director: Astrid Deinhard
Producers: Astrid Deinhard and Spartacus Olsson
Executive Producers: Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson, Bodo Rittenauer
Creative Producer: Joram Appel
Post-Production Director: Wieke Kapteijns
Research by: Isabel Wilson
Edited by: Karolina Dołęga
Sound design: Marek KamińskiColorizations by:
Klimbim
Carlos Ortega Pereira, BlauColorizations, https://www.instagram.com/blaucoloriz…Visual Sources:
Library of Congress
Adam Jones from Flickr: https://www.flickr.com/photos/adam_jo…Icons from The Noun Project: Sandhi Priyasmoro, Sarah Rudkin, Andrew Doane, Vectors Market, Adrien Coquet, ProSymbols, Luke Anthony Firth, Russia Woman & Gan Khoon Lay
Music:
“March Of The Brave 10” – Rannar Sillard
“Disciples of Sun Tzu” – Christian Andersen
“Deviation In Time” – Johannes Bornlof
“Other Sides of Glory” – Fabien Tell
“The Inspector 4” – Johannes Bornlöf
“Sailing for Gold” – Howard Harper-Barnes
“London” – Howard Harper-Barnes
“Split Decision” – Rannar SillarResearch sources:
– Lenin On the Emancipation of Women (1965), pp. 63–4. First Published July 1919, as a pamphlet
– Selected Writings of Alexandra Kollontai, Allison & Busby, 1977, First Published 1921, as a pamphlet, trans Alix Holt.
– Wendy Goldman, “Recasting the vision: The resurrection of the family”. In Women, the State and Revolution: Soviet Family Policy and Social Life, 1917–1936, (Cambridge Russian, Soviet, and Post-Soviet Studies, (1993) pp. 296-336), p.310Archive by Screenocean/Reuters https://www.screenocean.com.
A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.
Kyle Shideler outlines the history of Antifa from the Weimar Republic to the streets of cities all over the western world:
“antifa 8973ag” by cantfightthetendies is licensed under CC BY 2.0
With riots and civil unrest metastasizing across the United States, the president declared he intends to designate Antifa as a terrorist group. Predictably, the talking heads rushed out to declare that Antifa doesn’t really exist, and even if it did the president couldn’t possibly target it using that legal designation. They argue Antifa is an amorphous blob of discontents, not a functioning organization, and certainly not one which could be designated and targeted for concentrated counterterrorism enforcement.
As usual, the Twitterati don’t know what they are talking about. Reality is both simpler and more complex.
To begin at the beginning: Antifa — real name: Antifaschisitsche Aktion — was born during the street-fights of the 1932 Weimar Republic. It was founded by the Stalinist Communist Party of Germany (KPD), although various Communist “anti-fascist defense” units were associated with the KPD much earlier.
Anti-fascist Action’s sole purpose was to help the KPD combat other political parties for control of the streets in the revolutionary politics of the rapidly failing Weimar Republic.
And yes, they fought the Nazis.
But they also fought liberal parties, conservative parties, and anyone and everyone who got in their way. While these early antecedents were short-lived, it is useful to view Antifa in this context. More than anything, Antifa exists to serve as a tool of revolutionary politics in a failed (or failing) state.
Antifa would reestablish itself in the early 1980s, also in Germany, out of Autonomism. Autonomism is an anti-authoritarian anarcho-Marxist ideology associated with the Communist urban guerilla organizations of 1970s and ’80s Europe like Red Army Faction and the Red Brigade. Autonomism would find a home among the young punks of Germany’s squatters’ rights movement. Around this time, Antifa tactics like the “black block,” where large numbers of rioters dress in black and move together in formation as part of a larger protest, were developed.
H/T to Rafe Champion for the link.
As I have pointed out myself, the more one knows about a subject, the more conservative one becomes towards it. Conversely, the less one knows, the more liberal he becomes, and inclined to embrace “progress” and “reforms.” Even a Communist may prove a very conservative stamp collector, once he learns something about philately. It’s only economics he knows nothing about.
This is a universal principle. Everyone knows something about something, and is very backward on that which he knows. The one exception may be journalists, who know nothing about anything, and are therefore liberal all round.
David Warren, “I’ll be a Welshman”, Essays in Idleness, 2018-03-01.
Sarah Hoyt on the “script” that progressives operated under during the Cold War and almost unchanged in detail to the present day, too:
Krushchev, Brezhnev and other Soviet leaders review the Revolution parade in Red Square, 1962.
LIFE magazine photo by Stan Wayman.
… the Cold War had two sides: the USSR and our elites, who had been corrupted and taken over for a long time thanks to the communist agents who had long-marched through our media, our entertainment and our bureaucracy.
Heinlein claimed the Democrats had been taken over by communists, secretly, by the 40s. I have no reason to doubt him. I’m sure most of the bureaucracy and governments in Europe had been taken over that way also.
Even so called conservatives assumed communism would eventually win, because according to the numbers coming out of the USSR and the reporters visiting the USSR — anyone know where Duranty is buried? there should be a line to piss on his grave — they were just so much more efficient. Scientific governance, you know? And anyway, technology was going to be so advanced that most humans would be unemployable, and by the way, there were more and more humans every year, so it was impossible to have all these bourgeois luxuries. So communism, efficient, compassionate, communism was the future, the only way.
The realists who saw it was the only way were willing to do anything to bring it about. Because the people who weren’t as intelligent/well informed would otherwise destroy the world and bring about unimaginable catastrophe.
“Conservatives” were merely those who wanted communism to arrive slower and be a little less violent. Communism with a human face. Socialism on the way to communism. Easing us into our role as cogs in the machinery of the future — where there was no room for personal frills or really emotions — with gentle pneumatic shocks, instead of with the excesses of the Russian and Soviet revolution.
All of this btw is based on three glaring fallacies (phaluscies, since you have to be a dickhead to believe them particularly now.)
1- People are a drain not an asset. They are also a sort of robot incapable of changing behavior in response to changing circumstances.
2- Wealth can’t grow, nor can the carrying capacity of the Earth improve. So since humans can’t respond to reduced infant mortality by having fewer children, the only way to feed everyone is to reduce everyone’s rations. Forever.
3- It is possible for “the best”, properly educated people to be utterly selfless and to administer everyone’s wealth equally and for the common good. They will not revel in power, nor will they avail themselves of any excess. Because, they are absolutely moral and all seeing.
Note the left is still running this script. And some on the right too (Hello, Pierre Delecto!) not to mention all of Europe, left and right. Also note #1 conflicts with the left idea that they can bring about a future in which humans change to be all selfless, etc. But that’s actually complicated and tied in to their myths, which honestly are a Christian heresy, complete with paradise lost.
I know when they started out, the USSR thought it could “engineer” a new human. Homo Sovieticus. But I don’t know enough of Soviet myth to know what underlay that. Maybe it was a behaviorist thing and they thought humans could be trained into being completely selfless automatons. I know by the time I was reading communist theorists (no, I didn’t buy their arguments, but I was required to read them, given when and where I grew up) in the seventies, the philosophy had fallen prey to the agitprop notion that people in madhouses in the US were political prisoners just as in the USSR. (BTW this is part of what underlay the closing of the madhouses.) And that was part of a push in the seventies, as the malfeasance of USSR was starting to be glaring, amid escaped dissidents and escaping information. The push was to “prove” that both systems were equally bad. (The left is still flogging that dead equine, too. So Cubans and Venezuelans are starving? So how many people die of anomie and not being loved enough under capitalism? REEEEE.) So, since Soviets put dissidents in mad houses, so did we. But that necessitated that people who widdled on themselves and/or thought they were a lampshade with a set of dishes thrown in be completely sane “political dissidents”. The only way to do this was to attribute anything communists don’t like to “insanity brought about by capitalism.” This led to crazier byways of thought. For instance, it led to the idea of the pre-historic, pre-agriculture paradise, where everyone was equal, there was no poverty, need, greed, or the heartbreak of psoriasis. A sub-branch of the church believed women were in charge and everyone worshiped the mother goddess. And some of these “scientific, atheist socialists” also believe the goddess actually exists, though G-d doesn’t.
David Friedman had a different formulation for the utopian world many progressives wish for the rest of us:
In the ideal socialist state power will not attract power freaks. People who make decisions will show no slightest bias towards their own interests. There will be no way for a clever man to bend the institutions to serve his own ends. And the rivers will run uphill.
Severian on modern “art” and its practitioners:
Picasso’s “Guernica” in mural form in the town of Guernica.
Photo by Papamanila via Wikimedia Commons.
Leszek Kolakowski, in his essay collection Is God Happy?, wrote several fascinating essays on Communism vs. other forms of Socialism, such as Fascism and generic Leftism. He notes that while Communism proper attracted lots of serious intellectuals and artists, who produced some works of real merit, generic “Leftism” had few, and Fascism almost none.
He also notes the degeneration of art on the Left. I don’t want / am not qualified to get deep into the weeds of art history, but let me use an example (mine, not Kolakowski’s): Pablo Picasso vs … oh, pick an artist, they’re all Lefties … let’s say Andy Warhol. Noting that “important” can be diametrically opposed to things like “good,” “aesthetically pleasing,” etc., we can all agree that both were important artists. Whatever else their differences, the most obvious one was:
Sincerity.
Picasso was a lifelong member of the Communist Party. He was also a sincere artist (which, again, can be miles away from “good;” I personally can’t stand Picasso’s art). Guernica is wildly overrated, and its sentiment jejune — we all agree that bombing civilians is bad, mmkay? — but at least it’s sincere. Warhol, on the other hand, never took a sincere breath in his life. Making your work superficial on purpose doesn’t absolve you from the sin of superficiality. Warhol (and Roy Lichtenstein, and the rest of the “Pop Art” crowd) gave wannabes permission to substitute “being ironic” for “having something to say,” and there’s your modern art in a nutshell. Calling a modern “artist” a poseur is like calling water wet — what could possibly be the point?
Which brings us back to Kolakowski. He notes that there are apostates aplenty from Communism, and they all seem compelled to write big long books full of critical self-examination. Cheering for the murder of millions would do that, one supposes… except that, as Kolakowski says, you can’t find one single ex-Leftist doing it. Hell, is there such a thing as an ex-Leftist, as opposed to an ex-Communist? Kolakowski couldn’t find one (as of 1995, I think), and I can’t think of one either. Every former radical I’m aware of was just that — a radical, a card-carrying Communist or at least a virulent fellow-traveler, e.g. David Horowitz. We probably all have heard of someone waking up one day (say, after 9/11) realizing that the Democratic Party they’d been knee-jerk voting for all their lives was out to lunch, but do you know of any True Believers seeing the light?
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