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Quote of the Day: When You Chop Wood, Chips Fly
“There will be some innocent victims in this fight against Fascist agents. We are launching a major attack on the Enemy; let there be no resentment if we bump someone with an elbow. Better that ten innocent people should suffer than one spy get away. When you chop wood, chips fly.” — Nikolai Yezhov
Today is the 127th anniversary of the birth of Nikolai Yezhov. He was, for a time, the head of the NKVD (predecessor of the KGB and whatever the secret police in Russia is called this week) and Stalin’s right-hand man, the go-to guy for getting rid of political enemies. Until one day he wasn’t, and instead, he was just another chip of wood.
The left eats its own. Always. We see it today with the old constituencies being tossed aside for the new on the left. They call it progress. The old Progressives are no longer progressive enough. We progress to the next group, more progressive. We progress to the next leader, who can’t be associated with the last set of failures or murders. Yesterday’s working men and women are tossed aside for tomorrow’s gender-studies professors and activists. It’s not enough to be gay or bi, one now has to be trans. They churn and burn.
Nikolai Yezhov saw it coming. He spent the last few weeks before his arrest in an alcoholic haze. He knew the signs that Stalin was getting rid of him next. He was blamed for the Great Purge, and for allowing “massive, unfounded arrests of completely innocent persons.” Yeah, that’s why he was there. Beria followed him, and did the same thing, as had Yezhov’s predecessors, whom he had interrogated and denounced. The cycle continues on.
Published in Group Writing
If you have some nasty, dirty work that needs to be done, select someone that you can afterwards blame for it (after having him eliminated).
It works every time it’s tried.
Tyrants always fear the people, and especially the people closest to them. My “Egyptian History Podcast” discusses this issue in relation to a king in one of the earliest Egyptian dynasties, around 5,000 years ago.
Yep. Human nature has not really changed in thousands of years at least, maybe 300,000.
Or as Mr. Balzer is wont to term it “Play stupid games win stupid prizes.” You toady for a murderous dictator you’re going to get yourself murdered. Ascend to power over the corpses of your foes then you should expect to die with a knife in your back.
How soon and how hard before the Democrats start to learn such lessons?
Just hope they are knifes wielded by Americans rather than by the Dems foreign owners.
Yep. Yep. So much this.
It may be the fundamental difference between Left/Right,
RegressiveProgressive/Conservative, secular/religious, atheist/Judeo-Christian (what did I leave out?).One sees human nature as fungible and malleable; the other as it as painfully durable and predictably self-destructive.
Tools have gotten better.
Do you think Yezhov really believed that the victims or ones who would suffer were truly innocent? If you view people collectively and can attribute guilt to groups, then what do the actions of individuals matter? And why should the lives or deaths of individual people matter either?
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This post is part of the Quote of the Day (QOTD) Series, which is one of the group writing projects here on Ricochet. The other is the monthly group writing theme organized by @ cliffordbrown, currently open for volunteers to riff on the theme “Mother of —.” The QOTD signup sheet for May is here.
What I don’t understand about the Democrats is the obsession with defining their coalition down to smaller and smaller groups. First the throw over the white working class for the coalition of the ascended. Then they throw away the traditional minded coalition of the ascended for LGBTQ+-#!. Now they are throwing out parents, women, more minority people who may not be traditionalists but still have limits, and even some of the LG to embrace the T. The T is the smallest minority in the lot.
I am thankful they are going down this path, but it seems very short sighted and self defeating.
Cheka/NKVD/KGB/FSB-It’s all the same to this day.
And the Okhrana and. . .
You left out the OGPU, but yeah, same-same.
Merrick Garland reminds me of Yeshov.
That’s because betrayal is the go-to social skill of the r-selected individual.
There was a fundamental break between the Okhrana, the secret police force of the Russian Empire, and the Cheka, the first secret police force of revolutionary Russia. The Okhrana was disbanded in 1917, and the personnel of the Cheka were different.
The Okhrana was rather bumbling; for example, many of its political prisoners escaped from Siberian exile with little effort and returned to European Russia. While it abused human rights and tortured prisoners, its practices were nothing like those of the Cheka. Somewhere I read that the Russian government’s efforts to put down revolution from 1905-1917 resulted in about 5000 people being executed, with most of them actually being guilty.
In contrast the Cheka was brutally efficient. During the Red Terror in the 4-year period of the Russian Civil War (1918-1922), the Cheka executed about 100,000 people, many of them innocent. Hundreds of thousands were arrested. Unspeakable torture was used that Okhrana agents would never have imagined.
The sad irony is that Russia exchanged an inefficient tsarist regime that was tinged with cruelty but slowly reforming for a horrific, monstrous Soviet regime that persists until today.
Yep.
Tellingly, they all celebrate 5 December, the date of the founding of the Cheka in 1917, as their professional holiday, the Day of Chekists (День чекистов).
I think you could also add FBI & DHS… I little hyperbolic maybe…
But the Russia gate scandal demonstrates the leadership of the FBI is willing to push its agency to be the Sword & Shield for the Democratic Party – just as the KGB was the Sword & Shield for the Communist Party…The FBI leadership broke laws to protect the interests of the DNC knowing that there would be little or no consequences for their actions.
The FBI and DHS may be scandal-ridden and corrupt, but they are NOTHING like the Cheka. They don’t do mass arrests, executions by the hundreds of thousands, torture, starvation, and labor camps. It’s outrageous to compare the two.
It’s early yet.
Yet.
This is a great quote and connection to the current situation. The quote and the personage are both off the beaten path, yet you connected them to a current event. And it illustrates where American politics could go if we don’t change course as a nation. It’s a much more interesting and powerful post than the daily grind of electoral fraud, etc.
OUCH…and Jinx!
And yet, it ties into that, too.
Indubitably. 2,000 mules: