Perhaps the more ideological wouldn't enjoy the Soviet union but they approve of and use their methods.
The current focus on purity of thought is remarkably like the communist struggle sessions, how they tortured people to correct their thinking not just to achieve a confession, how there was always room for more ideology and more purges as the party continually turned on its heroes.
Here's an example. At ~25s the officer talks about people who want to help (lower-case social justice) being faded out by people who know nothing of the situation and are just using it for political clout. He's black and trying to discuss the protests with black protestors and they're being interrupted by white protest leaders (upper-case social justice) who need to stoke conflict to remain in power.
Yes, I agree. Some of the particulars look a bit different here, but the spirit of it is the same.
One thing it fits well with is progression through the Demoralization, and possibly Destabilization, phase(s) of ideological subversion as described by KGB defector Yuri Bezmenov.
It's hard to prove something like that as a cause, for obvious reasons, but I think the relevance for the features of what we're seeing is hard to deny.
The mistake here seems to be the somewhat naïve suggestion that the Soviet Union only took its path because the wrong people happened to find their way into leadership, rather than recognising that attempts at coërced ideological purity always seem to follow the same path historically no matter how well intentioned the ideology might have been.
When and where did you do your travels? Living in the former USSR I can absolutely confirm the history is way more complicated, than it is commonly presented. Changes over time, changes depending on people you speak to. In my country we have had read army, Finnish army and Waffen SS veterans living out their lives quite peacefully together but they would no doubt give you a very different perspective on how the GULAG felt. And it’s not that you can tell from the outside.
As to the ideology, I agree with you about fundamentalism leading to death and destruction. Marxism, however, contains the premise, that one particular class must be liquidated. Also, it requires people to behave in a very particular and unnatural way leading easily to a conclusion that these should be eliminated too. So maybe it lends itself better as a tool for madmen raising to power, than some others. Maybe it’s not that people trying to implement Marxism have ended up in chaos but that people seeking absolute power have tended to use it as an ideological cover and to rally a support?
> First, after the collapse of the USSR no information on these efforts was revealed.
On the contrary, quite a bit of evidence about these "active measures" campaigns was later found in the Mitrokhin Archives. Thing is, ideologies tend to take on a life of their own long after their original cause has subsided. The current "post-modern" woke discourse in the Western world can be understood as essentially a zombie variant of precisely the sort of KGB indoctrination Bezmenov talks about, cross-mutated with the highly successful memeplex of the "Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution" from China. (For better or for worse, Mao Zedong was greatly admired by radical youths in the 1970s and 1980s; and the Cultural Revolution - doing away with everything that's too old, traditional and counter to revolutionary goals - was very much credited to him at the time. Of course, we have since learned that the story was more complicated than that.)
It’s hard to separate Marxism from the USSR in the same way it’s difficult to separate facism from Nazi Germany, I think. I don’t see how one can reasonably separate a predominant ideology from the empire that popularized it.
Yes, those people, what they learned was political praxis: How to succeed and win an argument. How to be effective, in a minority, how to dominate a room. I was a member of a less rigid, less orthodox, (markedly less effective!) socialist student movement in the UK at a similar time as them in the late 70s and I know some, a little, of how they operate. An older generation in the SDS learned similar lessons during the anti Vietnam war campaign in the USA.
Some anticommunists fail to understand or believe you can ever cease to be a communist. Arguably, they're right: there are political lessons which can't be unlearned. Putin is anything but a communist, Russia is not a socialist state. Do you think Putin has unlearned what he learned across the sixties and seventies and eighties as a loyal party member? Different to Claire Fox but similar lessons learned I would argue.
No; it was perfectly clear. Who can you even point to in our society comes even remotely close to aligning with Soviet ideals? Like who are you even talking about? Nobody with leftist ideals thinks that the Soviet regime did things right.
Meh. Even setting aside non-(nominally-)Communist totalitarian regimes, the USSR experience seems to be that after the Party collectively becomes God-Emperor, any philosophy that was supposed to motivate that status is set aside like so much trash (possibly next to shot corpses of its authors). Ever noticed how the state in 1984 was supposed to be all ideological, yet had little actual ideology aside from the state being supreme and eternal? Orwell was not wrong on that one.
Sure, you’re supposed to read the foundational documents, think the old state was evil, say the dictatorship of the proletariat is coming, etc., but more often than not you’re paying lip service to the person who is apathetically droning out a butchered retelling of the whole thing. Occasionally they are actual starry-eyed devotees of the idea, but just what that idea is is somehow less important than uttering The Idea in hushed and reverent tones. (I promise I was not going for this Arendtian twist, it just came out.) More often than not, though, a position of ideological enforcer is more indicative of skill in navigating a slime pit of backstabbing bureaucrats than anything else. (There’s a reason why career man is one of the vilest late-Soviet curses—now extinct, funnily enough.) Hell, the very name of the state is a sad joke—the eponymous sovjets (literally, councils [of workers and farmers], but supposed to be local governments rather than advisory councils) were all but neutered by the end of the first decade if not earlier.
So, no. I don’t expect that the proclaimed ideology has much to do with it.
(None of this is to be taken as a defense of 19th-century German political philosophy as a viable economic strategy, mind you.)
I understand you are trying to use the woke activist tactic of insinuating that it’s racist to oppose woke communist redistribution and indoctrination schemes.
That’s not an argument and not an inquiry. Eg what you could ask is
“What makes you confident DEI is Marxist?”
It institutes DEI commissars (in Russian: a soviet) in every company like Stalin did to redistribute outcomes through equity from Marxist oppressor categories to oppressed categories while aggressively destroying dissent.
Turns out where a country sits on the authority-liberty spectrum is more important than pro-anti intellectualism. Being pro-intellectual doesn't necessarily mean being pro-liberty. America isn't going to send intellectuals to the gulags no matter how anti-intellectual the climate gets (assuming the legal system holds out).
I'll point out what seems obvious to me here - if "pro-intellectualism" means identifying a class of people, labelling them intellectuals and giving them a systemic advantage than that isn't a good idea. That is class warfare. If it means philosophically believing that rationalism and science are the keys to a better future then that was trialed in Soviet and Chinese systems of thought. It wasn't the only thing going on at the time and I agree it didn't work out very well - better to let people do what they want than to enforce that they believe 'good ideas'.
no George Orwell fans on HN then? I personally see too many parallels between Russia's versions of Communism and Capitalism. It doesn't matter how they dress it up, the ruling class are still abusing their positions and calling it progress.
This comment confuses Leninism/Bolshevism with communism. The writer would do well to understand the nuances of authoritarianism across all flavors of communism before making generalizations from specifics.
it's not uncommon in some countries/cultures to see people defend an abstract "communist" ideology while acknowledging the evils of the actual regimes.
So, it seems likely that if specifically more bolsheviks were around, they might take issues with the characterization of TFA, as grandparent says.
Critical race theory has elements that are reminiscent of the ideology of the Soviet communist party if you replace "white" with "bourgeoisie."
At first, the goal in Russia was to implement communism in order to create a more equitable society. Of course, the biggest enemy of communism is the rich landlord. So naturally this was used as an excuse to target all rich people, even those who didn't do anything wrong other than manage to build a good life for themselves. The great irony is that at some point, even poor and average people started being prosecuted in the name of communism and they lived in fear of being sent to the gulag.
Critical race theory (or perhaps the social justice movement in general) is used as a weapon to prosecute people, and the scope of who can be prosecuted is growing (cough the George Floyd trial.)
I feel the same way, but I think this era is much more directly similar to the "red guards" period during the Chinese cultural revolution than Soviet examples. Some of the parallels are just so direct -- students denouncing their professors, forcing them them to recant, the ideologies of the students growing more and more rigid and narrow through the conformity of the mob, until they often ended up even denouncing the professors who encouraged the movement to start.
No one ends up being safe from this kind of thing as it grows. Even Mao almost lost control of the tiger, even though he thought he could steer it. My grandfather fought the Japanese as a preteen and later fought with Mao, and even he was disappeared for three days by the mob during the cultural revolution because someone denounced him as not ideologically pure enough.
The current focus on purity of thought is remarkably like the communist struggle sessions, how they tortured people to correct their thinking not just to achieve a confession, how there was always room for more ideology and more purges as the party continually turned on its heroes.
Here's an example. At ~25s the officer talks about people who want to help (lower-case social justice) being faded out by people who know nothing of the situation and are just using it for political clout. He's black and trying to discuss the protests with black protestors and they're being interrupted by white protest leaders (upper-case social justice) who need to stoke conflict to remain in power.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hm2aFTTuLek
reply