History only provides lessons when it is taught straight up, without a chaser.
When that’s no longer done all the old ‘isms’ tend to repeat themselves, often re-branded and decked out in the most au courant finery, but always the same old utopian ideology at the core. And unless thwarted early-on always, always with the same ending: genocide followed by dystopia.
On it’s face it it would seem infeasible for history to be so systematically erased while at the same time being simultaneously repeated: in fact it is not a coincidence, it is a necessity. History must be obscured if you wish to lead people down the same well-worn path.
Don’t ever delude yourselves with the naïve belief that it could never happen here, of course it can. History does not just repeat, it travels. As Roger Simon notes in We Live in the Era of the New Conformists
“…the left and the semi-left, progressives and liberals, masses of them in our country from the corporate world to the media to the academy to entertainment, are the New Conformists.”
And there is nothing an authoritarian regime needs more than a herd of conformists.
“Italian novelist Alberto Moravia tried to explain why so many of his countrymen became Fascists under Mussolini. It was because of their desire to fit in, to seem normal, to follow the crowd. He called the novel ‘The Conformist’.”
Simon quotes from a 1976 Tom Wolfe article about how shocking Solzhenitsyn’s expose of the Soviet’s Gulag was:
The publication of The Gulag Archipelago in 1973, however, was a wholly unexpected blow. No one was ready for the obscene horror and grotesque scale of what Solzhenitsyn called “Our Sewage Disposal System”—in which tens of millions were shipped in boxcars to concentration camps all over the country, in which tens of millions died, in which entire races and national groups were liquidated, insofar as they had existed in the Soviet Union. Moreover, said Solzhenitsyn, the system had not begun with Stalin but with Lenin, who had immediately exterminated non-Bolshevik opponents of the old regime and especially the student factions. It was impossible any longer to distinguish the Communist liquidation apparatus from the Nazi.
Yet Solzhenitsyn went still further. He said that not only Stalinism, not only Leninism, not only Communism — but socialism itself led to the concentration camps; and not only socialism, but Marxism; and not only Marxism but any ideology that sought to reorganize morality on an a priori basis. Sadder still, it was impossible to say that Soviet socialism was not “real socialism.” On the contrary — it was socialism done by experts!
All that’s necessary to fall headlong into the abyss is to let socialist experts call the shots. Which of course the conformists seem hell-bent on doing.
Consider the way many western countries mistakenly concluded last year that strict Chinese-style lockdowns were the right way to cope with COVID, not realizing that no free society could possibly tolerate restrictions as draconian as the ones imposed all over China from late January last year… Neil Ferguson, the Imperial College epidemiologist, who was influential in the UK’s decision to lock down, has been quite open about his inspiration. ‘If China had not done it, the year would have been very different,’ he admitted in an interview in December. ‘“It’s a communist one-party state,” we said. “We couldn’t get away with it in Europe,” we thought. And then Italy did it. And we realized we could.’
History: some re-assembly required:
“Why are we surprised that the socialists running the increasingly corporatist business world take their cues from — and overlook the myriad horrors of — socialism done by today’s experts?”
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