Dear son,
It's remarkable that the poem First They Came begins "first they came for the socialists" because the socialists came first, and they came for everyone else. They didn't even come for the Jews first. In fact, an unGodly number of the socialists in Russia at the time of the Revolution were Jews, and the socialists in Russia came for whoever they wanted.
After years of riots and marches and terrorism and repression there were scuffles in the streets and then Lenin and the Bolsheviks came almost bloodlessly to power and then everything went wild. The defining factor of the beginnings of the Red Terror was that Lenin wasn't the defining factor. Orlando Figes notes in A People's Tragedy that it was the people who ran the lynch mobs in the cities and the countryside, nearly all of it decentralized, choosing whomever they wanted and calling them burzhoois and then maiming and killing them at will.
It wasn't socialists who suffered, unless the socialists were students or cleanly and nobody knew them well; unless somebody owed them money; unless they "looked Jewish" or managed a business or openly believed in aspects of classical liberalism. Russian cadets were thrown in jail or one by one into furnaces. Officers had their limbs broken and wrapped around their heads before they were murdered. Innocents were beaten to death for the sin of looking educated; and the entirety of Russia, hysterical with class hatred, convicted many "criminals" based on the softness of their hands instead of the record of their deeds.
But yes, first they came for the socialists. As if the Germans themselves weren't terrified of the communists doing the same thing to their best and brightest and their women and their children; as if the danger of a German communist uprising wasn't openly counted on and courted by the Red intelligentsia; as if the Nazis weren't a socialist counter-reaction (and what a counter-reaction!) to the hellish transgressions of ascendant communism. The Jews were treated poorly by the majority in Russia, so sizable portions of the Jews joined the communists. The Nazis saw what the Jews did in Russia* and so they turned on the Jews in Germany. The Jews can never catch a break it seems. But during the Red Terror, nobody good could catch a break. Which is why everyone good should hate a socialist.
But first they came for the socialists. They. Not the violent blackmasks attacking lawful citizens at rallies, or the DHS officials who put all gun-owning conservatives on a watch list, or the deans who allow rioters to shut down Republican speakers by setting their own colleges on fire, or the people who force you to do business when you find the business reprehensible, or the neanderthals who want to bring businesses and school districts down because the "free citizen" refuses to get in line and say the word xe. They. The men who actually fought against Nazis so that their grandchildren could liken them to Nazis. The men who are more like Winston Churchill than Adolf Hitler, who let you own your own property instead of taking it for the state, who believe so strongly in freedom of speech and so strongly against social conditioning and Sharia Law that they're willing to go to war over it. They. The men who are not and have never actually been coming to get you.
There was a lot of excitement when Donald Trump became the president and the term alternative facts became a joke and 1984 became a hit again because of it. It says more about American intelligence than anything Donald Trump's election could have implied. There are hundreds (and perhaps thousands) of accounts of actual dictatorships, from Athens turning into a wasteland to the quasi-fascist city of Sparta to anything in the Old Testament to the fall of the Roman republic to the establishment of the "Holy" Roman Empire to the rise of the Nazis to the rise of the communists to North Korea to a dozen backward failing South American and Middle Eastern and African banana republics.
But in their fear of a totalitarian uprising Americans didn't buy The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. They didn't buy The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, or read Plutarch's account of Cicero or Cato or Pompey or Caesar, or Livy or Sallust or Tacitus or Herodotus, or Macaulay's brilliant telling of the tyrannies of Charles I and James II and how Englishmen defended their rights to get us our own. They didn't go to Orlando Figes's masterful account of the Russian revolution and learn how angry societies get turned into murderhouses. They went to a work of fiction. They were terrified of alternative facts so they went where there weren't any facts. And these are the people who are going to save us from "fascism."
They told us that "they" were coming for the socialists and the Muslims. They forgot to say that before the Christians had invaded the Muslims the Muslims had been ordered to invade the world. They forgot to tell us that paid mobs of ignorant basement-dwelling radicals came for Cicero and Cato in the Senate. They neglected to say that nothing good ever came from the upper class paying the lowest class to terrorize the middle class, and that the most effective oppressor of the impoverished is not the right wing but the left**. All of these would have been mentioned but thank God these men have read 1984. So the classical Americans are the Nazis. So the socialists are the free men. So the terrorists are the freedom fighters, and the freedom fighters are the terrorists.
Gone are the days of raiders taking our women and highwaymen stealing our purses. We are instead plagued by our do-gooders and social justice warriors and philanthropists. Mao and Lenin wanted to create a world where everybody was equal and nobody was starving. The Snowflakes didn't see what happened the first time so they decided to try it a second. Ahmadinejad and ISIS want to nuke the world and usher in an era of the saints. The so-called anti-racists hate "Islamophobia" so much (?) that they are unwilling to stop the rape and invasion of Europe. Hitler believed deeply in science, and because he believed deeply in science he believed honestly in evolution; and because he believed honestly in evolution he wanted to create a world where the most beautiful and beneficial and intelligent people could thrive according to the laws of science and order. The Antifa hates a third-grade non-socialist version of Hitler so badly that they turned into a bunch of violent dysgenic second-wave brownshirts***. There's no limit to the ugliness of our goodness. There's nothing which can't be sanctioned under the guise of our charity. The Millennium has arrived and the saints are a pain in our asses.
Your father,
-J
*Figes notes in A People's Tragedy that the chief rabbi of Moscow once joked The Trotsky's make the revolutions and the Bronsteins pay the bills.
If we consider the Jews themselves as a people, it seems they're either saving us or killing us. From the small and almost obscure people in the Middle East we got Abraham and Moses and Jesus and Einstein; Trotsky and Marx and Mendelssohn and Freud; Betty Friedan, Von Mises, and Proust and Ricardo; Levi Strauss and Steven Spielberg and Ayn Rand and Solomon -- a host of people diverse in everything except their ability to move men. There seems to be something in the water; and we can almost excuse the Evangelical for his fanatical belief in the so-called Chosen People. The Jews have blessed the world more than anyone else and cursed it more than anyone else. The Jews gone right have saved our souls and given us hope. The Jews gone wrong have dragged us to the blackened gates of Hell. Out of Israel we got Christianity and Islam, libertarianism and communism.
Before 2002, the US Patent and Trademark Office reports that Israel -- the tiny nation of Israel, not counting the Jews in the United States of America who equal the number of their brethren in Israel -- got a total of 8,886 patents in the United States. India, the world's largest democracy, got 924. The People's Republic of China, the most populous country in the world, a nation whose citizens are reported to have an IQ higher than the average American, got 1,140. Egypt got 54. The United Arab Emirates got 29. Saudi Arabia got 168. Angola, Mongolia, Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Mali, Turkmenistan and Bangladesh had a combined total of 0.
It's been remarked by American conservative commentators (and especially Jewish and Evangelical ones) that the difference made here has to do with liberty. After all, Americans had 1,435,665 in the same period, 300,000 more patents than the entire rest of the world combined, followed (although far behind) by post-war Japan, Germany, South Korea, Taiwan, and the United Kingdom. But liberty can't account for everything. First there's the obvious fact that each of these nations was closely related to the United States. The "race realists," always favoring whites and northern Asians, would say many of these inventions have to do with genetics. The conservatives say it has to do with culture. I believe with the Jews it has to do with all three. In almost every country we're familiar with there seems to have been a fear of a Bronstein. America's own Bolsheviks are currently being funded by a rich Jew named Soros. Our Jews vote largely for the party that's against our natives having a party. Oppression in many countries hasn't kept Jews from gathering riches, riches have only led them to gathering power, and a collection of power in the hands of this universal minority has oftentimes driven them into further oppression.
**The Bolsheviks were never a people's party like the populists who believed in the goodness of the Russian peasantry. They were a working-class party; and the peasants of Russia, who were illiterate and difficult to propagandize and more interested in their own local communes than anything else, were eventually brutalized as the cities began starving. At this point, when hyperinflation made wages worthless and industry began to shut down and people were dropping dead on the streets and well-bred children were hiring themselves out as prostitutes, Lenin ordered armed Bolshevik patrols to begin raiding the country. Routine rape and murder and total oppression were the result; and the men in charge of the food patrols eventually ended up starving the countryside. A failed unreasonable quota was a sign that food was being hidden. Hidden food was a pretense for rape and for torture. Areas that had been centers of commerce became wastelands; and cannibalism became commonplace where bartering was the last refuge of humanity.
***For all the talk about brownshirts we have yet to hear anyone speak about Bolsheviks and their jackets. They were known for a manly swagger which they adorned in military leather and always (according to Figes himself) topped off with some kind of a firearm. The bearing of arms amongst party members was encouraged until it was banned in 1935. Even the Bolsheviks knew that weaponry and the pretense of liberty go hand-in-hand. This gives us little hope for our effeminate liberals, who prefer an equality in weakness rather than equality in strength.
It's remarkable that the poem First They Came begins "first they came for the socialists" because the socialists came first, and they came for everyone else. They didn't even come for the Jews first. In fact, an unGodly number of the socialists in Russia at the time of the Revolution were Jews, and the socialists in Russia came for whoever they wanted.
After years of riots and marches and terrorism and repression there were scuffles in the streets and then Lenin and the Bolsheviks came almost bloodlessly to power and then everything went wild. The defining factor of the beginnings of the Red Terror was that Lenin wasn't the defining factor. Orlando Figes notes in A People's Tragedy that it was the people who ran the lynch mobs in the cities and the countryside, nearly all of it decentralized, choosing whomever they wanted and calling them burzhoois and then maiming and killing them at will.
It wasn't socialists who suffered, unless the socialists were students or cleanly and nobody knew them well; unless somebody owed them money; unless they "looked Jewish" or managed a business or openly believed in aspects of classical liberalism. Russian cadets were thrown in jail or one by one into furnaces. Officers had their limbs broken and wrapped around their heads before they were murdered. Innocents were beaten to death for the sin of looking educated; and the entirety of Russia, hysterical with class hatred, convicted many "criminals" based on the softness of their hands instead of the record of their deeds.
But yes, first they came for the socialists. As if the Germans themselves weren't terrified of the communists doing the same thing to their best and brightest and their women and their children; as if the danger of a German communist uprising wasn't openly counted on and courted by the Red intelligentsia; as if the Nazis weren't a socialist counter-reaction (and what a counter-reaction!) to the hellish transgressions of ascendant communism. The Jews were treated poorly by the majority in Russia, so sizable portions of the Jews joined the communists. The Nazis saw what the Jews did in Russia* and so they turned on the Jews in Germany. The Jews can never catch a break it seems. But during the Red Terror, nobody good could catch a break. Which is why everyone good should hate a socialist.
But first they came for the socialists. They. Not the violent blackmasks attacking lawful citizens at rallies, or the DHS officials who put all gun-owning conservatives on a watch list, or the deans who allow rioters to shut down Republican speakers by setting their own colleges on fire, or the people who force you to do business when you find the business reprehensible, or the neanderthals who want to bring businesses and school districts down because the "free citizen" refuses to get in line and say the word xe. They. The men who actually fought against Nazis so that their grandchildren could liken them to Nazis. The men who are more like Winston Churchill than Adolf Hitler, who let you own your own property instead of taking it for the state, who believe so strongly in freedom of speech and so strongly against social conditioning and Sharia Law that they're willing to go to war over it. They. The men who are not and have never actually been coming to get you.
There was a lot of excitement when Donald Trump became the president and the term alternative facts became a joke and 1984 became a hit again because of it. It says more about American intelligence than anything Donald Trump's election could have implied. There are hundreds (and perhaps thousands) of accounts of actual dictatorships, from Athens turning into a wasteland to the quasi-fascist city of Sparta to anything in the Old Testament to the fall of the Roman republic to the establishment of the "Holy" Roman Empire to the rise of the Nazis to the rise of the communists to North Korea to a dozen backward failing South American and Middle Eastern and African banana republics.
But in their fear of a totalitarian uprising Americans didn't buy The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. They didn't buy The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, or read Plutarch's account of Cicero or Cato or Pompey or Caesar, or Livy or Sallust or Tacitus or Herodotus, or Macaulay's brilliant telling of the tyrannies of Charles I and James II and how Englishmen defended their rights to get us our own. They didn't go to Orlando Figes's masterful account of the Russian revolution and learn how angry societies get turned into murderhouses. They went to a work of fiction. They were terrified of alternative facts so they went where there weren't any facts. And these are the people who are going to save us from "fascism."
They told us that "they" were coming for the socialists and the Muslims. They forgot to say that before the Christians had invaded the Muslims the Muslims had been ordered to invade the world. They forgot to tell us that paid mobs of ignorant basement-dwelling radicals came for Cicero and Cato in the Senate. They neglected to say that nothing good ever came from the upper class paying the lowest class to terrorize the middle class, and that the most effective oppressor of the impoverished is not the right wing but the left**. All of these would have been mentioned but thank God these men have read 1984. So the classical Americans are the Nazis. So the socialists are the free men. So the terrorists are the freedom fighters, and the freedom fighters are the terrorists.
Gone are the days of raiders taking our women and highwaymen stealing our purses. We are instead plagued by our do-gooders and social justice warriors and philanthropists. Mao and Lenin wanted to create a world where everybody was equal and nobody was starving. The Snowflakes didn't see what happened the first time so they decided to try it a second. Ahmadinejad and ISIS want to nuke the world and usher in an era of the saints. The so-called anti-racists hate "Islamophobia" so much (?) that they are unwilling to stop the rape and invasion of Europe. Hitler believed deeply in science, and because he believed deeply in science he believed honestly in evolution; and because he believed honestly in evolution he wanted to create a world where the most beautiful and beneficial and intelligent people could thrive according to the laws of science and order. The Antifa hates a third-grade non-socialist version of Hitler so badly that they turned into a bunch of violent dysgenic second-wave brownshirts***. There's no limit to the ugliness of our goodness. There's nothing which can't be sanctioned under the guise of our charity. The Millennium has arrived and the saints are a pain in our asses.
Your father,
-J
*Figes notes in A People's Tragedy that the chief rabbi of Moscow once joked The Trotsky's make the revolutions and the Bronsteins pay the bills.
If we consider the Jews themselves as a people, it seems they're either saving us or killing us. From the small and almost obscure people in the Middle East we got Abraham and Moses and Jesus and Einstein; Trotsky and Marx and Mendelssohn and Freud; Betty Friedan, Von Mises, and Proust and Ricardo; Levi Strauss and Steven Spielberg and Ayn Rand and Solomon -- a host of people diverse in everything except their ability to move men. There seems to be something in the water; and we can almost excuse the Evangelical for his fanatical belief in the so-called Chosen People. The Jews have blessed the world more than anyone else and cursed it more than anyone else. The Jews gone right have saved our souls and given us hope. The Jews gone wrong have dragged us to the blackened gates of Hell. Out of Israel we got Christianity and Islam, libertarianism and communism.
Before 2002, the US Patent and Trademark Office reports that Israel -- the tiny nation of Israel, not counting the Jews in the United States of America who equal the number of their brethren in Israel -- got a total of 8,886 patents in the United States. India, the world's largest democracy, got 924. The People's Republic of China, the most populous country in the world, a nation whose citizens are reported to have an IQ higher than the average American, got 1,140. Egypt got 54. The United Arab Emirates got 29. Saudi Arabia got 168. Angola, Mongolia, Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Mali, Turkmenistan and Bangladesh had a combined total of 0.
It's been remarked by American conservative commentators (and especially Jewish and Evangelical ones) that the difference made here has to do with liberty. After all, Americans had 1,435,665 in the same period, 300,000 more patents than the entire rest of the world combined, followed (although far behind) by post-war Japan, Germany, South Korea, Taiwan, and the United Kingdom. But liberty can't account for everything. First there's the obvious fact that each of these nations was closely related to the United States. The "race realists," always favoring whites and northern Asians, would say many of these inventions have to do with genetics. The conservatives say it has to do with culture. I believe with the Jews it has to do with all three. In almost every country we're familiar with there seems to have been a fear of a Bronstein. America's own Bolsheviks are currently being funded by a rich Jew named Soros. Our Jews vote largely for the party that's against our natives having a party. Oppression in many countries hasn't kept Jews from gathering riches, riches have only led them to gathering power, and a collection of power in the hands of this universal minority has oftentimes driven them into further oppression.
**The Bolsheviks were never a people's party like the populists who believed in the goodness of the Russian peasantry. They were a working-class party; and the peasants of Russia, who were illiterate and difficult to propagandize and more interested in their own local communes than anything else, were eventually brutalized as the cities began starving. At this point, when hyperinflation made wages worthless and industry began to shut down and people were dropping dead on the streets and well-bred children were hiring themselves out as prostitutes, Lenin ordered armed Bolshevik patrols to begin raiding the country. Routine rape and murder and total oppression were the result; and the men in charge of the food patrols eventually ended up starving the countryside. A failed unreasonable quota was a sign that food was being hidden. Hidden food was a pretense for rape and for torture. Areas that had been centers of commerce became wastelands; and cannibalism became commonplace where bartering was the last refuge of humanity.
***For all the talk about brownshirts we have yet to hear anyone speak about Bolsheviks and their jackets. They were known for a manly swagger which they adorned in military leather and always (according to Figes himself) topped off with some kind of a firearm. The bearing of arms amongst party members was encouraged until it was banned in 1935. Even the Bolsheviks knew that weaponry and the pretense of liberty go hand-in-hand. This gives us little hope for our effeminate liberals, who prefer an equality in weakness rather than equality in strength.
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