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The Woke Left’s Totalitarian Roots
Professor Richard M. Ebeling has a piece on AIER’s website that compares today’s woke Left with its Marxist and Nazi antecedents. In sum, Ebeling argues that each of the three ideologies:
- Reduce all human experience and history to one or two “truths” taken to their illogical extremes
- Reject reason and the Enlightenment
- View people, not as individuals, but in terms of dogma-dictated categories
- Reject the notion that there can be common ground between people assigned to different categories
- Hold that people in different categories have their own, mutually exclusive, truths
- Are focused on concentrating power in the hands of the “enlightened” few
Here are a few excerpts:
Like their Marxian and Nazi forbearers, these new totalitarians look at the world with a fanatical self-righteousness that they have the clear and correct vision of the “true” bases of society’s ills and the only answer for its healing. The Marxists saw nothing but a two-dimensional world of exploiting capitalists who were abusing the “workers of the world.” The Nazis were certain that all the evil in human history was due to a worldwide Jewish conspiracy to dominate and defile mankind’s purer “races.”
Our modern-day identity politics warriors are absolutely certain that all of history is the story of white, male domination of women and “people of color” through the institutional means of private property and capitalist methods of production and control. Everything else is a “false consciousness” created by white men determined to maintain their power over all others on the planet.
All the talk about individual liberty, free enterprise, freedom of speech and the press, or freedom of association are ruses and rationales, they say, to hide from view the underlying “real” relationships of domination and oppression that cover over what actually binds people together and represents their “objective” identities.
…
They talk about “social justice,” but it really means the injustice of force through coercively determining what for and how individual human beings may go about thinking, acting and interacting with others. They refer to dignity and diversity, but in their lexicon of meaning this really means demeaning anyone who thinks and acts differently than their tribal ideologies dictate, and homogenizing human uniqueness and difference into political group pigeonholes for purposes of paternalism and power-lusting.
The new totalitarian tribalists, like their Marxist and Nazi intellectual ancestors, reject the ideas and achievements of the 18th and 19th centuries, achievements that cultivated and created a social, economic and political climate and institutional setting respectful for individual human beings, compared to the degradations and indignities and cruelties for most of human history before then.
…
Published in GeneralMarxism spoke of your raised “class consciousness.” Nazism urged you to discover yourself in your “blood” and primitive racial emotions. The Identity Politics Warriors insist that you self-identify based on the color of your skin, the cultural roots expressed in your ancestor’s clothing, customs, and cuisine, and how you “feel” about your self-designating gender today that might be different tomorrow and which no one else may judge or fail to recognize.
Doctrinaire Marxists often asserted that capitalist and proletarian interests were so inescapably in conflict with each other that no common ground could be found through attempts to “reason together.” Your social class molded the way you thought. “Reason,” therefore, was a servant of class interests. Nazis insisted that each race possessed its own “logic,” and even insisted that there was a distinct German science from Jewish science; no common ground for reasoning together existed between German and Jew, the Nazis said. These different logics were tools in the battle between races for survival and domination.
Our Identity Politics Warriors declare that any disagreement or dissent from their conceptions of human beings in terms of declared group definitions and designations are to be discounted and condemned as “proof” of racism, sexism and power for the white one percent. Even trying to understand another ethnicity’s experiences of life are instances of condemnable “cultural appropriation.” Each ethnic and racial group, and one presumes every one of the dozens of different genders as well, lives in its own unique hermetically sealed world, with no common humanity of shared knowledge and experience.
Anti-rationalists who nevertheless love science. Or at least their version of science.
They are anti-science when it comes to (1) the pandemic, (2) when babies live, and (3) anything else that challenges the Marxist ideology.
… the economic viability and environmental benefits of electric cars …
What annoys me so much is how the foundational texts of Marxism, Bolshevism, National Socialism, and Fascism are all readily available for free online so there’s zero excuse for people not to make themselves acquainted with what the leaders and intellectuals of those movements actually believed, and yet so few people take the time to read the stuff.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/index.htm
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/14058
Thanks for posting. The only wokeness I want to see is conservatives waking up to the fact that the social justice agenda is not a justice agenda, it is a fight for two diametrically opposed world views as outlined by the professor. It took me a long time to recognized that their aggression was not defensive aggression but offensive aggression. Defensive aggression means that you have threatened me in some way and I will defend against that threat but if you back off, both sides will de-escalate. Compromise is possible. Offensive aggression means I want what you have and I will attack to get it. If you fail to defend, I will see that as a sign of weakness and take what I want. If you do defend, I will marshal additional forces to get what I want. The only way that I will back down is if you defeat me utterly. No compromise is possible.
Read just two more books — The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich and The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression — and you’ll be all caught up.
Oh, and toss in Darkness at Noon for all the woke foot soldiers out there too.
Double Like!
Terrific piece by Prof. Ebeling. Thanks for highlighting it, Richard.
I will add a comment for those who want to dig deeper into the common history of Naziism and Marxism.
It isn’t widely known, but in addition to being a great economist, Von Mises was a scholar of the history of Progressivist thought, from Hegel to the Right and Left Hegelians, and all of the later thinkers and promoters of Marxism and Naziism.
Until I discovered and read some of this scholarship, and learned the actual historical evolution of Marx’s philosophy from the early work, Communist Manifesto, to his later works after Das Kapital, I had no understanding of this history. Just as I thought that Mohamed’s philosophy concerning non-believers and jihad was a single monolith that emerged full-grown during the Mecca period, I assumed that (a) the Communist Manifesto and (b) the violent, totalitarian philosophy that was picked up out of the dustbin of Western thought by Lenin and used to justify the Bolshevik revolution, were of a piece.
Here is where the above passage by Dr. Ebeling comes in. It may give the false impression that polylogism–the theory that each class had its own logic–was a point of division between Marx and the Nazi intellectuals: that it was distinctively Nazi.
In fact, it was a common feature. Marx himself adopted polylogism and made it foundational to his second system of thought. The late stage began after the humiliating universal rejection of Das Kapital by the intellectual community. It had been intended as the first of a series giving a comprehensive logical system of economics to counter the free market-friendly theory of Smith, Ricardo, the Mills’s, and Say, and give support for his social/religious doctrine.
Basically, because Marx apparently recognized the logical fallacy upon which his system was based, and couldn’t find any way to resurrect it, he was forced to abandon logic altogether in order to build his revolution, which many intellectuals believe had always been inspired by intense personal hatred, envy, and rejection of the bourgeoisie, and hatred of Christianity.
Gossamer Cat:” Offensive aggression means I want what you have and I will attack to get it. If you fail to defend, I will see that as a sign of weakness and take what I want. If you do defend, I will marshal additional forces to get what I want. The only way that I will back down is if you defeat me utterly. No compromise is possible.”
This is the essence of the Totalitarian Left we face and particularly instructive is:” If you fail to defend, I will see that as a sign of weakness and take what I want.”
People have to understand that compromise with the Radical Left is not possible. There is no common ground. They do not believe in Human Rights, Reason, Tolerance or the Values that led to our Constitution and their is no point in arguing with them because of that lack of common point of discussion in which to engage. In their minds, we on the right of center are in their version pure evil and as such have abdicated any right to be heard or for that matter even to exist.
The urge to compromise will be turned on those who offer compromise and they will at a minimum be humiliated or even much worse. We have to defend our Values, Our Republic and our Way of Life or else all those things that not too long ago we took for granted may gone in a blink of an eye.
Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are just stalking horses of this Totalitarian Left takeover. They must be defeated or we will be toast.
The Gulag Archipelago.
And they do not accept Forgiveness, which may be excluded because it sounds like a religious tenet, but Compromise often includes something akin to Forgiveness. So if there is no Forgiveness, any attempt at Reparations will never be adequate to repair anything.
Scottish philosopher, David Hume, wrote, “Generally speaking, the errors of religion are dangerous; those of philosophy are only ridiculous.” George Will suggests that this is because religious disputes can’t be resolved through reason. Whether the woke Left is peddling religion or philosophy, they explicitly reject reason, leaving their ideas to be promulgated through indoctrination, force, or, one supposes, revelation.
Great post.
@markcamp, intellectuals love to believe it’s all about the pure logic and scholarship, but sitting and writing a book damning capitalism while suffering from boils on your behind and being supported by your bourgeois capitalist father-in-law could feel pretty personal, especially if your book flops. Then you rationalize it with “they can’t handle the truth” and away you go.
So maybe inspired by resentment due to his failure, but fueled by personal hatred, resentment, then the rejection of the bourgeoisie and the Jewish and Christian underpinnings of their rise.
“
“Worlds I would destroy forever, Since I can create no world, Since my call they notice never.” — Karl Marx
It hadn’t occurred to me to think of Marx’s father-in-law and perhaps his abused wife reacting to the failure of Das Kapital, and the intensified feelings of anger and shame he would have felt.
A father is an enemy of a drunken ne’er-do-well who marries his daughter from the beginning. The woman is initially on the side of her husband. When Marx became a notorious failure even as an intellectual (he was a parasite to family and that of his friend Engels already) maybe something snapped. We will never know, and it doesn’t matter to me as an economist.
Good thought. Might have been a factor in the horrible shift in his poisonous teachings.
The predecessor of Lenin and Hitler, indeed. Also Antifa and Burn, Loot, Murder.
I once heard a psychiatrist discussing Wilhelm Reich; he made the case that Reich’s theories framed his pathologies and deficiencies as virtues. I don’t think it’s just true for psychological theories.
Postscript: Reich was also a Marxian of some sort.