4/27/2023 0 Comments John gray unherd![]() New, ‘transformative’ systems of law enforcement will confront problems not unlike those faced by the police forces that have been dissolved. As could have been foreseen by anyone with a smattering of history, outbreaks of mass looting in Chicago and other cities have not borne out this confidence. Once repressive institutions have been methodically dismantled, a peaceful anarchy will prevail. As some of the insurrectionaries’ placards have proclaimed, there will be no more police violence when there are no more police. The only concrete measure proposed has been to defund and disband the police. These are symbolic actions aiming to sever the present from the past, not policies designed to fashion a different future. The key scenes in the woke uprising that followed the killing of George Floyd are rituals of purification in which public officials have washed the feet of insurgents, and acts of iconoclasm in which public monuments have been destroyed or defaced. Suggested reading The woke have no vision of the future Amidst vast inequalities of power and wealth, the woke generation bask in the eternal sunshine of their spotless virtue. Cleansing themselves and others of sin is their goal. Rather than aiming for a better future, woke militants seek a cathartic present. Yet their difference from Lenin goes deeper. In Leninist terms they are infantile leftists, acting out a revolutionary performance with no strategy or plan for what they would do in power. Woke activists, in contrast, have no vision of the future. Even so, Lenin attempted to fashion a future that in his view was an improvement on the past. Tens of millions were enslaved in forced labour camps, executed or starved to death in pursuit of a repellent fantasy. One may abhor the type of society Lenin aimed to construct as much as the methods he adopted to achieve it, as I do myself. In woke movements such as Antifa, on the other hand, violence seems to be mainly therapeutic in its role. For the Bolshevik leader - an authentic disciple of the Jacobin Enlightenment, or so he always insisted - violence was a tool, not an end in itself. Yet the impulses that animate the woke uprising are different from those that energised Lenin or even Mao. The rejection of liberal freedoms concludes with the tyranny of the righteous mob. Like the communist elites, woke insurgents aim to enforce a single worldview by the pedagogic use of fear. As in the show trials orchestrated by Lenin’s disciple Stalin and Mao’s “struggle sessions”, woke activists demand public confession and repentance from their victims. ![]() Rejecting old-fashioned liberal values as complicit in oppression and essentially fraudulent, they extend their power not by persuasion but by socially marginalising and economically ruining their critics. ![]() The woke generation have learned a similar lesson from their elders, this time about the failings of American democracy. More from this author The woke have no vision of the future As one of Dostoevsky’s characters put it, “I got entangled in my data…Starting from unlimited freedom, I conclude with unlimited despotism.” Not only Tsarism but any form of government came to be seen as repressive. Dostoevsky’s Demons (1871) is a vivid chronicle of the tragic and farcical process by which progressive liberals discredited traditional institutions and unleashed a wave of revolutionary terror. In late nineteenth century Russia, under the influence of their progressive parents, a generation of educated young people was convinced of the illegitimacy of the Tsarist regime. Nevertheless, Bolsheviks and woke militants do have some things in common. The current convulsion is an outbreak more closely akin to the anarchical millenarians movements that raged across Europe in the late Middle Ages, whose vision of redemption from history was shared by America’s founders, who carried it with them to the New World. But what is unfolding, in the US and to a lesser extent in other countries, is at once more archaic and more futuristic than a twentieth century revolutionary coup. As some conservative commentators have observed, there are striking similarities between woke militants and the Bolsheviks who seized power in 1917.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |