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The Rise of the Politruk
Politruk – (communism, military) A supervisory political officer responsible for ideological education and organization; political commissar.
In the US armed forces, the role of a chaplain is to provide spiritual support and other personal services. In an earlier era, chaplains played a similar role on college campuses. The Soviet armed forces were officially atheistic. There were no chaplains. Instead, there were political officers provided to educate personnel in Marxist dogma. Whereas a chaplain on a US Navy vessel does not make reports of suspected impious thoughts and statements by sailors and their officers (imagine the time, GBs, and bandwidth such systematic reporting would require), the Soviet political officer did make such reports and could destroy careers or get people arrested.
DEI politruks on campus and in HR departments are empowered to educate personnel in whatever Marxist twaddle and anti-western groupthink is au courant. Like their Soviet role models, they are also empowered to report dissident thoughts and thus keep their charges (even their nominal bosses) in a state of fear. Consider the shocking presumption of the Stanford Law School bureaucrat feeling authorized to publicly dress down a federal appellate judge for failing to conform his decisions to woke criteria.
The old Soviet version of communism at least promised a happy ending, a nirvana of pure equality as the state melted away and productivity surged. The new Marxism says that we will deny ourselves the use of technological knowledge, eat bugs, and destroy our cultural and political legacy until such time as white people die out and take math, science, democracy, punctuality, and logic with them to the grave so those remaining can presumably rejoice in their respective “truths.” The new Marxism is all resentment without hope. Its sole appeal is that people screwing up their own lives can avoid introspection and pretend that something else is at fault. And be righteously angry about that.
In his magnificent War on the West, Douglas Murray discusses in detail the sick mindset behind wokeness, the state of being completely possessed by resentment:
For Nietzsche, one of the dangers of the men of ressentiment is that they will achieve their ultimate form of revenge, which is to turn happy people into unhappy people like themselves—to shove their misery into the faces of the happy so that in due course the happy “start to be ashamed of their happiness and perhaps say to one another: ‘It’s a disgrace to be happy!
And this state of mind is made possible only by extinguishing the capacity for gratitude:
There are many attitudes that we all take in our lives, some of which dominate at one point in our lives and recede in another. But a life lived without gratitude is not a life properly lived. It is a life that is lived off-kilter: one in which, incapable of realizing what you have to be thankful for, you are left with nothing but your resentments and can be contented by nothing but revenge.
It is not even an issue for modern Americans of all political stripes that slavery and other historical failures and injustices were bad. The problem is that we are not allowed to notice that (a) these failings were universal and in no way exclusively Western, and (b) there is a hell of a lot of good in our culture, including the value system that caused us to address and continue to move past such historical sins much faster than other cultures.
DEI is a projection festival for losers. A part-time barista/ANTIFA follower has very little “work” to do to shed his “whiteness” unlike someone whose work and study habits got him into a top medical school or got her an early partnership in a blue chip law firm I am usually hesitant to argue reductio ad Hitlorum but the pathetic martyrdom narratives (“Say Their Names!”) culminating in the wildly venerated death of George Floyd are too similar to Goebbels’ brilliant manipulation of the murder of the pimp, thug, loser Horst Wessel into the defining martyrdom narrative of the Nazi party and the basis of the party’s theme song. Derek Chauvin was in no way responsible for Floyd’s litany of bad choices leading up to that fateful arrest. However, the party does not tell minority kids to avoid making bad choices like Floyd but instead preaches that nothing was ever his (or their fault) so long as “systemic” racism exists (an enemy that is too subtle, malleable, and fictitious ever to be eliminated).
The sick left has not yet transformed the US government such that party members can rise without tiresome barriers like separation of powers, elections, or federalism. When they do get the America they want, some DEI politruk will be our Martin Bormann. Bormann was a minor Nazi thug who rose quickly because (a) he had strong skills as a bureaucrat; (b) he had even stronger butt-kissing skills that made him Hitler’s right-hand man; (c) he was a natural to become the head of HR for the Nazi regime and (d) he exhibited no indication of having a conscience. He was ahead of even Hitler in his hatred of Christianity and willingness to persecute the churches. His best friend became commandant of Auschwitz. Clearly, this was a man who “did the work” and crushed out the best of his Western heritage to serve the party (and himself). That next Bormann is out there, no doubt cheering for the trans Nashville child-killer and angling for a way to use her/her/their social media skills, woke zealotry, and street violence experience to serve and rise within the agenda of a corrupt deep state.
If there was a Lord Acton award for a post this is the post.
“Few discoveries are more irritating than those which expose the pedigree of ideas.”-Lord Acton
Slogging through Camus, Sartre, or Nietzsche as depressing as they might be, can give some insight into the new nihilists. Meet the new nihilists, same as the old nihilists.
Theognis, a 6th Century BC Greek poet:
The world would be a better place if they took their own advice rather than encouraging you to do so first.
Great post! It’s funny how these attributes show up in so many places. I just mentioned this in my writing on feminism. It isn’t enough to feel like a victim, but of course someone must be at fault. Darn it.
There is a power in not being at fault.
There is also a misery in having no agency
And the misery of having no agency (e.g., graduating as a functional illiterate from a Baltimore high school) is more fuel for the resentment. Keeping black people resentful and dependent on white liberal largesse is a feature not a bug.
Peter Drucker’s first book, The End of Economic Man, was largely about the rise of European Fascism. His analysis was that it was primarily a reaction to the feeling that institutions, religions, and ideologies–including Marxism–had failed.
He said that prior to 1914, European socialism had been largely about Hope, whereas after the war, it was largely about Resentment.
Re Politruks…past and present…see my 2021 post Pasha is going to need to talk to you.
I don’t read much of that sort of thing, but this one sounds tempting.
I regret to say I had missed that post back in 2021, because it was perhaps not so long since I had watched the entire series on YouTube, as well as the sequel series. They helped me learn how the film industry under Putin was rehabilitating the reputation of the political officers from the Stalin days. The political officer in the sequel is a jerk, of course, but it was a personal failing and not a fault of the system of blue-hat officers. And what can you expect when the political officer and one of the combat pilots are both after the same girl (also a combat pilot, if I remember correctly). In unreal life he’s not going to win the girl, but he’ll do his duty (also, if I remember correctly).
The male lead in both series, Dmitri Dyuzhev, has had some good roles, e.g. in the film The Island, but more recently he has been a cheerleader at some of Putin’s staged war rallies. Some say he has developed a drug problem, which may account for his embarrassing behavior in getting roped into the role and embarrassing himself on stage.
The female lead in the first series, Ekaterina Vilkova, played Betsy in the film Stilagi, which I’ve referred to several times on Ricochet. It’s great fun to watch despite being riddled with anachronisms. She should have been given the lead role as she had wanted, but this was a film in which the supporting cast carried the load, and it worked out well. She has had a lot of roles since then. I have no information on what she’s been doing since the full-scale invasion started.
“Politruk”
That’s going into the verbal quiver.
The book is not as well-written as Drucker’s other works, but is very worth reading. It’s been on my list to review for some time, but it’s hard to summarize well.