Category: totalitarianism

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Totalitarian States: it comes from the bottom as well as the top

Vladimir Voinovich said this in the 1980s. So does my colleague Rebel Yell. People imagine that totalitarian ideology is imposed from the top. Yes, but not exclusively. It also pervades from below and around. The lie is the basis of totalitarianism. So said Solzhenitsyn. You can think of several without difficulty. Sex is a social construct. Gender trumps sex. Race is simultaneously a social construct; white people invented race in the 18th century. Black lives actually matter – more than any other race. You belong to the sex you feel that you belong to. My pronouns are…

But cancel culture is a participatory sport; anyone can join in. In fact mass participation in the denunciations of wrongthink are mandatory. It is the envious neighbour who enforces the lie far more effectively than the policeman.

Jordan Peterson touched upon this aspect of totalitarianism in a recent interview with Piers Morgan. Listen to the discussion around the little Hitler in all of us. “The totalitarian state is the grip of the lie”

 

 

 

 

 

Mass Psychosis now and forever

A friend came to use the swimming pool and on her way back to her house she commented on the fact – as she believes- that the world is burning up. There has been smoke in the air from distant forest fires. At church on Sunday in the prayers for the people, the speaker prayed for those not accepting vaccinations and for a respite from forest fires which were caused by out of control climate change. These are intelligent people, and the frame through which they perceive reality is that we are in an ongoing man-made  catastrophe. The alternative that I propose is that we are in a state of mass psychosis. It is equally man made, but one side is plugged into reality and the other is delusional. But who, you might ask?

 

If you can endure the reciter’s annoying voice and cadence, I recommend you work through this interesting video on mass psychosis, linked below.  Fear leads to menticide, menticide to totalitarian rule. The terror comes in waves. It is being generated and manipulated by elites. Does this sound to you like what you are experiencing? We live in an age which is at once technocratic, puritanical, and unforgiving. The obsession with power by today’s radicals is  the characteristic of the pagan world before Christianity. You will miss it when it its effects on people are gone. In truth you are experiencing a world which is increasingly de-Christianized. False gods abound.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=09maaUaRT4M&ab_channel=AfterSkool

The video is based on the work of Joost Merloo’ s The Rape of the Mind, which is expensive, but worth considering buying.

 

 

 

 

Stalin’s War by Sean McMeekin

 

Even after reading two volumes of Steven Kotkin’s thorough and excellent  biography of Stalin, I am still surprised at the extent of Stalin’s evil. Take a passage from Sean McMeekin’s “Stalin’s War” for example. The USSR invaded portions of Romania in 1940, on no other grounds than Stalin could get away with it, Hitler was still his ally, and the British and French were powerless.

 

“In the first two weeks after the Soviet invasion, 51,391 ex-Romanian citizens were taken into custody by occupation authorities. By August 2, 1940 the total had surpassed two hundred thousand. By year’s end, three hundred thousand Romanians had been deported from Moldova SSR to Gulag camps in the Soviet interior.”

Can you imagine what it means in terms of repressive power, trains, track, locomotives and feeding, to arrest, process and deport 300,000 people? And for no reason other than they belonged to the wrong social and economic classes.

Okay so you get the point.

McMeekin has stood the usual recital of World War 2 on its head, and it is time that this was done.

Until recently we have been obsessed with Hitler, to the relative exclusion of the other villain, Stalin. There were several reasons for this. First Germany is nearer to the English speaking world and started off more civilized and fell faster into totalitarian makeover than Russia. Second, the Germans were defeated in 1945 and their records were opened since then, whereas Russian archives were only opened since the fall of Communism in 1990. By then the momentum to blame all of WW2 on Hitler had become unstoppable, even though Stalin  played a hugely important role in abetting Hitler in the early stages of the war and the Japanese operated their conquering empire in complete independence of either. And third, not to be underrated, there has always been granted to communism a free pass from criticism by most of the political Left, that operates to this day.

McMeekin’s thesis is to stand the usual accounts on their heads, to situate Stalin as the chief winner in WW2, as the chief villain, as the promulgator of much more extensive evil, and to see Hitler’s Germany as the tool of the USSR, up until it betrayed Stalin by invading the USSR in 1941. Who was the economic colony of whom, asks McMeekin? Who was utterly dependent on Soviet oil and raw materials for its war making?

I am not sure I will agree with all of McMeekin by the time I have finished Stalin’s War. Nevertheless I welcome the refreshingly new perspective that restores to us a vision that was present at the time, before the heroic narratives of Churchill and those of British and American historians came to predominate,  that between Hitler and Stalin there was only a choice of which kind of murderous tyranny would kill you.

McMeekin draws our attention to the oft-forgotten obvious fact, that Stalin killed millions more people than Hitler, was granted more time to do it in, and was convinced of the need to act this way to bring about a claptrap utopia of poverty and repression.

I am enjoying McMeekin’s Stalin’s War. I hope you will read it too.

 

The Internet is broadcasting, therefore let us regulate!

The new Broadcasting Act, Bill C10, may be stymied in the Senate of Canada, but the actual content of its policy objectives has just been released. Heritage Canada has published “Guiding Principles on Diversity of Content online”. The Guiding Principles have several advantages over the policy objectives of section 3 of the Broadcasting Act. They are not legislated, they can be revised and adapted according to the how the technologies or the societies that adopt them evolve, and they have no legally binding force. They have only the force of the large platforms to back them, if they sign on to the Guiding Principles.

It was Tim Wu in The Master Switch who pointed out that the structure of an industry mattered a lot more than any other factor in determining whether there could be censorship. Vertical integration of the movie-making business with distribution and movie theaters meant that the censors could govern the industry through the code of conduct, one that lasted from Mae West in the 1930s to Easy Rider in the 1960s.

The basic idea of the Guiding Principles is the achievement of diversity, equity and inclusion. It is a set of principles that its signatories are expected to work towards. The most important signatories will be the Internet platforms, because without their compliance, the Principles will be mere hot air.

The private sector companies to which the guiding principles are to apply particularly include “services operating online, whose primary purpose is to broadcast or distribute content or share user-generated content online.” Governments, media sector representatives, regulators and civil society organizations are likewise to be included as signatories.

The goal is to promote diversity on-line, understood as

  • Creation access and discoverability of diverse content online
  • Fair remuneration and economic viability of content creators
  • Promotion of diverse, pluralistic sources of news and information as well as resilience against disinformation and misinformation
  • Transparency of the impacts if algorithmic treatments of online content.

 

Signatories are to agree to implement these goals within the scope of their responsibilities and to develop specific commitments by December 2022 at the latest, to show concrete actions they will take to implement these guiding objectives”.

There follow a number of principles which assume, as a matter of fact, that

  1. There are “equity deserving groups” whose access is limited
  2. Hate, racial prejudice, disinformation and misinformation “can disproportionately affect indigenous people and equity deserving groups”.
  3. “Equity deserving individuals and groups” are defined as those facing significant barriers to participation in different facets of society, a marginalization that could be created by attitudinal, historic, social, economic, legal and environmental obstacles.

Having seen the cartoons of the kids of various heights standing on boxes of various heights to see the baseball game over a wooden fence, “equity” may reasonably be interpreted to mean active measures to overcome the consequences of inequalities, natural or artificial. The term ‘equity’ involves, in modern parlance, an ongoing governmental interference to achieve goals that might not otherwise be achieved in the absence of governmental actions.

The Principles are organized around themes:

  • Creation access and discoverability of content
  • Fair remuneration and economic viability of content creators
  • Promotion of diverse, pluralistic sources of news and information as well as resilience against disinformation and misinformation
  • Transparency of the impacts of algorithmic treatments of online content.

 

The last-mentioned goal says that “content recommendation algorithms and their developers should minimize potential systemic biases and discrimination in outcome, related to such things as race, sexual orientation, gender identity and ability.”

Content recommendation algorithms now seek to interest me in what is related to what I have previously expressed an interest in. If I have expressed interest in videos of Andrew Camarata fixing bulldozers, the algorithm is likely to recommend other machine-oriented males fixing tractors, chainsaws, and building log cabins. Inevitably the algorithms will direct me to things of interest to males, such as myself. I imagine the same happens with videos on golf, tastes in music, physics, flower gardens, or cooking, Japanese art or any taste whatever. How then, it may be asked, will an algorithm correct for systemic bias in male oriented videos if I am a male, and female oriented videos if I were female?

The Guiding Principles do not say, but they expect content recommendation systems to “respect freedom of expression in a way that allows for safe and diverse content.” In other words, safety and diversity, as defined by governments or the platforms, are to constrain freedom of expression.

The Guiding Principles are a kind of Broadcasting Act for the Internet, or a set of objectives that the platforms are expected to implement  By this I mean that the system it envisages is systemic, organized, comprehensive, global (as far as Canadians will see) and subject to government regulation, and that in Annex A to this document, the signatories are expected to develop by December 2022 at the latest “concrete actions they will take to complement the guiding principles.  These specific commitments will remain evergreen and continue to evolve”.

The great advantages for the government, in its efforts to regulate the Internet, are that the Principles utterly bypass legislation, need no Parliamentary approval, require the cooperation of the platforms but not of society, and subject large areas of private tastes to algorithmic manipulation.

The Guiding Principles are creepily totalitarian, and yet one imagines the authors of this document think of themselves as being great public benefactors. In order to explain what I mean, I ask you, as a thought experiment, to replace the content of the particular goals to be achieved by the guiding principles. Look at the whole thing, and ask yourself what the document, conceived as a whole, says. It says in short, that speech carried across the Internet is to serve particular purposes. All speech, everywhere, that is carried on the Internet.

Agreement or disagreement with the guiding principles as they are stated is less important than the whole purpose of the document. Take out the language about diversity, equity and inclusion (the new modern woke credo) and replace it, in this thought experiment, with any other set of goals to be achieved. These goals could be anything: the divinity of Christ, the supremacy of the Aryan race, the sanctity of the Roman Church, the triumph of scientific socialism, the grandeur of the Aztec Sky God Huitchilopotchtli, the preservation of the British Empire, or the values of the Enlightenment. So let [x] stand for the content of the Guiding Principles. Forget whether you agree with them or not. Just think of the Guiding Principles as a block of ideas that can be lifted out and replaced with some other set of desiderata. In effect, by calling the Principles an evergreen document, Heritage Canada virtually guarantees that they will be revised in time.

Then perhaps it becomes clearer that my point is not the DEI principles, though they are creepy enough. It is the idea that everything on-line should be aimed at any guiding principle at all.

Would you think it normal that the publishing industry in Canada be enjoined to publish books that exclusively promote a certain political agenda?

Would you think it right that speech across various telephone and voice applications be organized to conduce to the achievement of diversity, equity and inclusion?

To make the point even clearer, I recall the story of a Canadian diplomat who served in the Soviet Union, as it then was, in the Brezhnev era. I asked whether there was freedom of speech in the Soviet Union. He said ‘yes there was, absolute freedom of speech’. I was startled.

-What do you mean absolute freedom of speech?!!

– If you are out on the ice fishing in winter, and in your shelter, and out of range of prying microphones, and talking with people whom you have known all your life or from high school, and you have developed trust over decades, you can talk about anything. And they do. They talk about stuff no one talks about here, like whether Hitler was right to invade Stalin’s USSR, or whether Communism is a pile of crap, or whether the USA is actually imperialist. There is complete freedom of discussion. You just have to be careful with whom and where you share your ideas.

People need to look at the Guiding Principles from this perspective. Canada will have complete freedom of speech. Just not the kind we have been used to. Thank you, Peter Grant.

 

You are not even allowed to observe: “benign racism”

North American racial totalitarianism is reaching new levels of absurdity. According to this “news” item in the CBC Ottawa site, three policemen are under investigation about a private conversation they had two years ago. Here is the CBC story.

“The Ottawa Police Service (OPS) is conducting an investigation after a video circulating online this week shows uniformed members of its force having a racist conversation.

“The video is a partial recording from a security camera at a person’s home and was originally posted on social media by a friend of the person involved.

“On Thursday, that person confirmed the video was recorded in his garage in the summer of 2019. He said the officers were there to serve a warrant after he had been pulled over for driving without a licence a few days earlier. He asked CBC not to identify him because he fears for his safety and that of his family.

“The video shows three police officers standing in a garage, seemingly unaware that their conversation was being recorded.

“One officer said, “Our days are done. White man’s day is done.”

“Another officer replies, “you’re probably right.”

“A third said, “you’re onto something.”

“The population of North America, we’re the minority I think even at this point,” one officer goes on to say.

“You go to Toronto and every couple you see walking by is a mixed couple. You don’t see white and white people together. It’s white [and] Asian, white [and] East Indian,” he said.

“I told my son he can find a Chinese, Asian girlfriend,” he continued. “If he wants to stay in the mix, get your foot in the door.”

The reaction of the ottawa Police Service was:

Regardless of the intent, the comments expressed in the video have negatively impacted community members and service members. The comments are offensive and they have further eroded public trust as well as internal morale.” 

The police statement goes on to say “such statements are not consistent with the values of the Ottawa Police Service and they have no place in the policing profession.”

In order to turn this banal if somewhat gloomy exchange into a “news” story, the obligatory authority figure is called in to  describe this as “racist”.

“Reacting to the video, Xiaobei Chen, a sociology professor at Carleton University, said: “I think these are very troubling racist ideas that we are seeing behind the conversation.”

“The conversation in the video, Chen said, is a prime example of the “enduring notion of white ownership of this nation,” despite North America first belonging to Indigenous people and being “built on the back of free labour, of Blacks under cruel conditions, under slavery and also exploitation of Chinese labour.”

“What’s especially problematic about this [conversation] is it’s benign. What it tells us is that these conversations are probably happening a lot of times, but we just don’t see it,” Chen said.

“Chen said she hopes OPS uses this video as a stepping stone to address white “nationalistic notions and racism and colonialism within the police force.”

What’s especially problematic about this conversation is it’s benign, says the Chinese Canadian sociologist. So according to the CBC it is a racist conversation, and according to the Chinese sociologist it is benign – and that’s what makes it “especially problematic”.

Thus it is possible to be racist, colonial and benign in almost the same breath. You are not even allowed to observe the fact that white people, as such, are being shoved out of power and told their feelings of belonging to the former Canada are both racist and colonialist.

Many thoughts come to mind.

The first is a photo taken [not shown here], I think in 1916 at the rebuilding of the Canadian Parliament after the fire that year, but it could have been taken in 1872 after the orginal building was completed. It is about four feet wide, and shows the entire work crew, numbering over a thousand men, with the architetcts and foremen seated in the centre, in Victorian hierarchy. They are lined up in many rows between the two central towers of Centre Block. What strikes you immediately when you see it is that not a single person among them is black or Chinese. Some faces look French Canadian or a tiny few may be Amerindian, but the overwhelming majority of workers are white  people of British origin. No women. No other ethnic or racial minorities. This was a white Dominion. The photo is found downstairs at Irene’s Pub, 885 Bank Street, just outside the washroom. To see this photo is to see how much change has happened in a hundred years to this country. [Google Images does not have it, because I suspect it shows too many white people gathered together for a historic triumph].

Original Canadian Parliament Building, Centre Block before the 1916 Fire

 

The second thought that comes to mind is that racial or national consciousness of any kind, even benign, is now considered “problematic”. As John Derbyshire has observed, you are not allowed even to observe.

While it is obvious that race and racism -but not actual racial differences – are obsessions of the political Left, it is also clear that the term racsim, rather than connoting a grievous moral fault, has morphed into racial consciousness or awareness of any kind. It is useful to our thought controllers to conflate racism with simple awareness of race. We must be exquisitely conscious of race, but not conscious of what race might actually mean.

The state of doublethink has arrived: we are simultaneously to be hyper-aware of race, but white people are not allowed to converse about it among themselves on any terms, even benign.

 

 

Woke versus anti-Woke

The theme I have been exploring on this blog is that a lot of people are more scared of the woke than they are of Trump, whereas all we hear in most media is from people of the opposite belief. The people more scared of Trump than the woke fill the pages of the New York Times, the Globe and Mail and the MSM in general.

Rod Dreher explores these themes in an article in the American Conservative: Joe Rogan World versus NPR World, One Country Two Nations.

A citation:

“If you’ve never heard Joe Rogan’s podcasts, I urge you to listen to them. Rogan has right-wing guests on, but only because he finds them interesting. He endorsed Bernie Sanders for president, favors drug legalization, supports LGBT rights, and so on. He’s a left-libertarian, as far as I can tell. What makes Rogan so much fun to listen to is — again — you feel that you are listening in to a conversation by someone who is genuinely curious about the world, and who is not afraid to talk about things that the prissy, censorious left-wing media are.”

“I am sure Joe Rogan differs from Orthodox Christian socially conservative me in a number of ways, but I would a thousand million times rather live in Joe Rogan World than NPR/NYT World. The stories Joe Rogan lives by are not the stories I live by, mostly, but I would trust Joe Rogan to defend people like me against the Pink Police State that the left seems bound and determined to create. One thing he said in that Douglas Murray podcast that resonated deeply with me: him and Murray agreeing on how insane Trump is, but how people on the left simply cannot grasp that they alarm many center-right people so much that they are less worried about crazy Trump than they are about the crazy left. This seems to be the neuralgic point between my self-described anti-woke liberal reader, and me: that we look at the same things, and dislike the same things, but that he is much more alarmed by Trump than by the woke, while I come down on the opposite side.”

To illustrate my point, this morning’s snippet of wokeness is from that poseur idiot Ibram X. Kendi, with reference to the Supreme Court nominee Amy Barrett’s adoption of two Haitian kids:

“Some White colonizers “adopted” Black children. They “civilized” these “savage” children in the “superior” ways of White people, while using them as props in their lifelong pictures of denial, while cutting the biological parents of these children out of the picture of humanity. twitter.com/jennybethm/sta

 

 

 

I am reaching the point where this man makes sense

It is not about your health.

I spent an evening with a well-meaning Torontonian lady last night, in an over-priced restaurant serving pretentious food. Her entire conversation was focused on COVID avoidance procedures here and in Toronto. Every aspect of family life and education has been re-organized to avoid COVID, including a changing station for clothes when the kids come home from outside. From her conversation it would appear that most other families of her social class are equally as vigilant in protecting against the contagion. She spoke of widows not even able to see their husbands in their dying moments and unable to mark their deaths with a funeral.

As Rebel Yell has tirelessly shown,  a huge gap exists between the actual risk and what is the perceived risk of getting sick, let alone dying from COVID. If Toronto remains enslaved to these avoidance practices, we will never recover our  society and economy.

I keep thinking the COVID scare is a dress rehearsal for totalitarian social control. That is what the man in the video above has concluded. I don’t know whether all that he says is true, but the suspicion is growing.

In the meantime the Trudeau Family Regime (TFR) gets away with $250,000 in speaker’s fees from the self-promoting Kielburger brothers. Noting to see here. Move on. Parliament is not in session. Indeed, maybe Parliament can be permanently dispensed with.

It is not about your health.

The other suspicion that I have is that the people who run the world got so freaked out over Trump’s election that they have panicked and gone overboard. They are now running a candidate who is obviously demented in senility, and they are not even pretending that he will be President for long if he wins. We are in very dark place right now, and it will get worse.

Social distancing for everyone except protesters at Black Lives Matter rallies. 

After all, we have to respect the historic moment.

 

 

Our Orwell, who art in Heaven

The events of the past months – murders, riots, firings for writing that all lives matter, statue shattering – reveal that the Leftist war on the past is total. The Left seeks power for ever, by erasing the past. The coverage of Trump’s speech before the Mount Rushmore monument showed that patriotism is now considered by the New York Times, the Washington Post and their ilk to be white supremacy. White supremacy is touted when there has never been less chance of encountering even so much as white self-respect. White idiots are kneeling before black people seeking forgiveness. Useful idiots every one.

Faced with my incapacity to say anything sufficient to the occasion, I refer to George Orwell for relevant insights and quotations, This one is from “the Prevention of Literature”

 

“Literature has sometimes flourished under despotic regimes, but, as has
often been pointed out, the despotisms of the past were not totalitarian.
Their repressive apparatus was always inefficient, their ruling classes
were usually either corrupt or apathetic or half-liberal in outlook, and
the prevailing religious doctrines usually worked against perfectionism
and the notion of human infallibility. Even so it is broadly true that
prose literature has reached its highest levels in periods of democracy
and free speculation. What is new in totalitarianism is that its
doctrines are not only unchallengeable but also unstable. They have to be
accepted on pain of damnation, but on the other hand, they are always
liable to be altered on a moment’s notice. Consider, for example, the
various attitudes, completely incompatible with one another, which an
English Communist or “fellow-traveler” has had to adopt toward the war
between Britain and Germany. For years before September, 1939, he was
expected to be in a continuous stew about “the horrors of Nazism” and to
twist everything he wrote into a denunciation of Hitler: after September,
1939, for twenty months, he had to believe that Germany was more sinned
against than sinning, and the word “Nazi”, at least as far as print went,
had to drop right out of his vocabulary. Immediately after hearing the 8
o’clock news bulletin on the morning of June 22, 1941, he had to start
believing once again that Nazism was the most hideous evil the world had
ever seen. Now, it is easy for the politician to make such changes: for a
writer the case is somewhat different. If he is to switch his allegiance
at exactly the right moment, he must either tell lies about his
subjective feelings, or else suppress them altogether. In either case he
has destroyed his dynamo. Not only will ideas refuse to come to him, but
the very words he uses will seem to stiffen under his touch. Political
writing in our time consists almost entirely of prefabricated phrases
bolted together like the pieces of a child’s Meccano set. It is the
unavoidable result of self-censorship. To write in plain, vigorous
language one has to think fearlessly, and if one thinks fearlessly one
cannot be politically orthodox. It might be otherwise in an “age of
faith”, when the prevailing orthodoxy has long been established and is
not taken too seriously. In that case it would be possible, or might be
possible, for large areas of one’s mind to remain unaffected by what one
officially believed. Even so, it is worth noticing that prose literature
almost disappeared during the only age of faith that Europe has ever
enjoyed. Throughout the whole of the Middle Ages there was almost no
imaginative prose literature and very little in the way of historical
writing; and the intellectual leaders of society expressed their most
serious thoughts in a dead language which barley altered during a
thousand years.

Totalitarianism, however, does not so much promise an age of faith as an
age of schizophrenia. A society becomes totalitarian when its structure
becomes flagrantly artificial: that is, when its ruling class has lost
its function but succeeds in clinging to power by force or fraud. Such a
society, no matter how long it persists, can never afford to become
either tolerant or intellectually stable. It can never permit either the
truthful recording of facts or the emotional sincerity that literary
creation demands. But to be corrupted by totalitarianism one does not
have to live in a totalitarian country. The mere prevalence of certain
ideas can spread a kind of poison that makes one subject after another
impossible for literary purposes. Wherever there is an enforced orthodoxy
–or even two orthodoxies, as often happens–good writing stops. This
was well illustrated by the Spanish civil war. To many English
intellectuals the war was a deeply moving experience, but not an
experience about which they could write sincerely. There were only two
things that you were allowed to say, and both of them were palpable lies:
as a result, the war produced acres of print but almost nothing worth
reading.”