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Guest • 4 years ago
Mark B. • 4 years ago

Please be quiet about mr. Dreher keeping it up or not. Let him be, it gives us interesting stuff. In the unfortunate event he gives himself a burnout, I am sure he will find lots of interesting things to say about that as well. Besides, I just read that a burnout is a gift to oneself that one should cherish. So no worries.

Guest • 4 years ago
C. L. H. Daniels • 4 years ago

While you may be correct about the potential for specifically revolutionary violence, that does not mean we cannot end up living under a repressive regime. Writing the neo-Bolsheviks off as "silly" is to gravely underestimate the potential consequences of their seizure of our civic institutions.

Yes, we may find them intellectually unserious. They probably are, after all. That doesn't mean that they themselves are not deadly serious in their beliefs, however. Just because you don't share their irrational faith doesn't mean that you can't be forced to live according to its dictates should they gain enough power.

JonF311 • 4 years ago

I wouldn't refer to vegans as "bohemians". If anything the program strikes me as decidedly ascetic, and one of the few such instances in modern culture.

Meg • 4 years ago

Transgenderism may be an end run around this problem, a way for men - some of them quite aggressive - to get high status in the SJW hierarchy.

William L. Anderson • 4 years ago

I believe that any group, once its members become convinced that they are saving the world and that anyone in their way is The Enemy to be Destroyed, can move into engaging in mass murder. Don't forget that the progressives of yesteryear not only supported the Bolsheviks, but every other communist movement and not only being morally superior, but superior in every other way, too.

Read back issues of Sojourners after the Vietnam War ended. Jim Wallis either denies that mass executions were taking place or he hints that maybe those being executed deserved their fate. He also refused to condemn the murderous destruction of Cambodia while it was going on. I believe that it is only one step that a lot of these people have to take before they descend into the hell of mass killing.

Joseph Jsoe • 4 years ago

The Bolsheviks were led by intellectuals? Maybe you mean unlearned half-intellectuals like Lenin.

Frau Katze • 4 years ago

There were definitely practical trade unionists and the like, mostly men.

But there was also a general movement amongst the upper classes themselves that it was very similar to the SJWs. It was romantic and lacked practicality. There were lots of women there.

I’ve read several books on the Russian Revolution and I can’t remember which one described these people. Or perhaps each book mentioned something about them.

Without WW 1 and the Germans delivering Lenin straight from Switzerland to Russia, the revolution may never have occurred.

Lenin promised to remove Russia from the war, and he did.

I’m tempted to go and order this new book. I find the subject fascinating for some strange reason (I have zero personal connection).

Greg • 4 years ago

Its Dostoevskys Demons that is the most insightful work from/about Russia on the psychology of political fanatics: Bolshevism, SJW, etc are all illumined by his masterpiece more so than analogies between social-political systems with very different etiologies.

Landless Shepherd • 4 years ago

Dostoevsky clearly saw the coming chaos. The tsars should have paid more attention to him.

minsredmash • 4 years ago

Could't agree more. The similarities of both branches of totalitarianism are staggering. Couple of points:

In Russia of the late 19th century, there was a great deal of apocalyptic fervor, and, of course, a number of Marxist and other left-wing revolutionary groups. The Bolsheviks were the most ruthless and disciplined of them all. Slezkine says it doesn’t matter whether the faith of the Bolsheviks was really a religion or not. The fact is, it functioned like one.

1) Bolsheviks didn't exist in 19th century. Bolsheviks faction of RSDRP - Russian social-democratic party was formed in 1903. They were not the most ruthless either - there were many other vicious parties and groups, more violent and outright crazy.

2) Revolutionaries in Russia acted like religious fanatics and did't hesitate to use Religious terminology either. Take the infamous 1869 "The Catechism of a Revolutionary" by Sergey Nechayev:

The revolutionary knows that in the very depths of his being, not only in words but also in deeds, he has broken all the bonds which tie him to the social order and the civilized world with all its laws, moralities, and customs, and with all its generally accepted conventions. He is their implacable enemy, and if he continues to live with them it is only in order to destroy them more speedily

Lenin adored the man.
Dostoevsky's "Demons" were inspired by Nechayev and his followers.

Guest • 4 years ago
Guest • 4 years ago
Sean Dougherty • 4 years ago

Not true for most American conservatives. They are not conservative per se, but reactionaries.

Philly guy • 4 years ago

The left does not want to tear anything down. They just want to take it over and administrate it in accordance of their beliefs.

Guest • 4 years ago
Derek • 4 years ago

I just said the same thing Osse. And I suspect your prediction will prove true. I lean conservative but some of the smartest people I know are liberals and have no plans Irving desires for a Bolshevik Revolution. It’s just silly partisan nonsense. Equally detrimental to both sides and the middle. What say we both sit back and count the down votes. Because we foolishly thought we could ALL rally around the principles of liberty and free expression and government for and by the people. Let them show us how wrong we were.

Michael Fitzgerald • 4 years ago

Internet comment sections are not reality.

arlenejohnson • 4 years ago

They can be. I have learned quite a bit of valuable information from Comment sections, sometimes more than the actual article about which the comments come.

kirthigdon • 4 years ago

There is a lot in Slezkine's book which is quite interesting, but a lot more which is merely tedious. Rod does us a big favor with this Reader's Digest version.

Kirt Higdon

Rob G • 4 years ago

The Year of Big Russian Books! Currently reading the newly translated Stalingrad by Grossman, to be followed by its better-known sequel Life and Fate. Now this. Oy vey!

Seriously though, this looks amazing.

This is what I was getting at the other day when I said on another thread that SJW-ism is fundamentalist. It's not actually Bolshie, because it stems too much from a godless version of Yankee Puritanism. But the parallels are definitely there.

Rod Dreher • 4 years ago

I stumbled into the book because I had to make the 8-hour drive to Dallas, and was looking for a book on tape. Our local library had it available through the streaming app Libby. I had meant to read it earlier in my research, but was intimidated by its size. However, sitting in one spot for 16 hours over the course of a weekend, it's more approachable. On audiobook, it's 45 hours long! I ended up buying a paperback copy so I can continue. I'll be going to Russia next week, and might bring it with me.

zosimas • 4 years ago

Fr Seraphim Rose was writing and warning 40-50 years ago about precisely this phenom coming to America — obviously not with prophetic specificity concerning the LGBT agenda, etc., — the essentially religious aspect of secular millennialist movements, tracing them to the Anabaptist uprisings, the French Revolution, etc. Have you read his slim book 'Nihilism'?

Rod Dreher • 4 years ago

I have not. I'll find it.

John10 • 4 years ago

"they don’t want to destroy the institutions of society. Rather, they want to conquer them and administer them"
Yes, that is the brilliant insight of the SJW and the modern left: No need to abolish capitalism, just get all the jobs in the HR department so you can indoctrinate all the employees.
Good insight about the apocalyptic style of the SJW. They indeed look for the progressive Son of Man from Heaven so to speak, who will lay the ax to the old tree of white/Christian/hetero culture and cast the bad fruit into the fire. Escape this via the Benedict Option? "Who said you could flee from the coming wrath?", their prophets will ask.

JonF311 • 4 years ago

However, HR work is increasingly outsourced these days. Not offshored- but staffed by temps and contractors, not firm employees.

Victor von bloom • 4 years ago

“ NYT is its Pravda”

What an absurd claim. Fox News is much more akin to Pravda than the NYT ever would be. Fox literally runs non-stop propaganda for the president and attempts to cover for his corruption. NYT has never had that kind of relationship with any president that we know of. Hosts on Fox have massive conflicts of interest which they don’t report (Hannity and his use of Cohen as his private lawyer). That is what a Pravda looks like.

Rod Dreher • 4 years ago

Look, I'm a paid subscriber to the Times. I have to read it for the same reason Kremlinologists had to read Pravda. It really is Pravda for the Social Justice faith system.

rymlianin • 4 years ago

Years ago, the Washington Post was named "Pravda on the Potomac'. It still serves that purpose.

Guest • 4 years ago
Rod Dreher • 4 years ago

Yes, I did go back, because I found that to do my job, I need to have easy (= non-paywalled) access to a major mainstream news source. I can't afford a WSJ subscription. The Times and the Washington Post are equally liberal. I find the Times more thorough, and anyway, I'm familiar with it.

Frau Katze • 4 years ago

WSJ is worth the subscription. Their editorial section is good.

Victor von bloom • 4 years ago

Rod, Fox News executives and hosts are literally having daily calls with Trump and actively run interference for his screw ups. Show me evidence of the Times doing the same with any president. Also, didn’t you post a few weeks ago on the 1619 stuff where you went out of your way to state that you were in fact canceling your Times subscription?

Rod Dreher • 4 years ago

I did cancel it, but after a month or so had to go back, because I found I couldn't do my job without having unpaywalled access to a major news source. Can't afford the WSJ, and the Times is more comprehensive than the Washington Post.

You're simply wrong to think that politics is the only form of power in this country. It's not even the most important form of power. That's cultural.

PatrickSheaEsq • 4 years ago

Agreed. It's statements like this one of Rod's that are going to sap his argument of any credibility accept among the right's version of SJWs.

Rod Dreher • 4 years ago

Do you read the NYT regularly? It's hard to overstate how often they report on SJW topics as advocacy, not as journalism.

PatrickSheaEsq • 4 years ago

Yes, I read or at least scan large parts of the NYT, WSJ, WP, FT, and the Guardian daily. I'm a journalism junky all across the spectrum, for better or worse, so I also hit the reputable magazines and journals pretty often, too, especially the science press.

I'm not so sure it's as hard to overstate the NYT's advocacy as you think, since some folks seem to do it often.

Rod Dreher • 4 years ago

The NYT's power comes from its advocacy being magnified by the people who read it. As with the Guardian in the UK, they are the ones who run academic and cultural institutions. In the US, the NYT sets the Overton window for broadcast media and major regional newspapers. Believe me, I've been in these newsrooms. It's not like the Times sends out a talking points sheet daily to make sure everyone is on message. It's rather that journalists -- most of whom are secular and liberal -- look to the Times for guidance by example.

PatrickSheaEsq • 4 years ago

No doubt the NYT and Guardian have an elite readership, but I remain unconvinced they have nearly as much power as you believe to set the Overton window for all of broadcast media. In fact, I can think of a very obvious opposing pole that exerts at least as much force on the window, though it is aimed at a less elite audience.

I'm sad to say it, but major regional newspapers are barely relevant at this point. As you no doubt know, the Sentinel, Herald, and Times Union (to cite some Florida examples) are barely shadows of what they were when I was a child. I'm not aware of anyone I know younger than I am who reads a regional, non-profession-based newspaper regularly. They tend to be driven by online outlets that are news aggregators, and that Overton window is entirely different.

Nonetheless, the main point I argue with you over is the idea that what the NYT is doing is pure advocacy. They have a perspective, to be sure, but it doesn't seem any more extreme than many other outlets.

Frau Katze • 4 years ago

NYT has become incredibly awful. At least the op-ed section.

It seeps into the news coverage too.

I’m sure it wasn’t this bad in the early 2000s.

Conrad O'Connor • 4 years ago

I believe the Puritan Moses was Oliver, not Thomas, Cromwell.

Rod Dreher • 4 years ago

You're right. I changed it. What's so funny is that as I was up late last night writing that post, I was thinking about a book Prof. Tighe sent me this year about Thomas Cromwell. I told myself to be sure not to make the mistake of putting Thomas's name where Oliver's should be. And I made that very mistake!

JonF311 • 4 years ago

I was going to point that out but figured someone else had beaten me to it.
The two Cromwells were akin (Thomas was a collateral ancestor to Oliver) but they were as different as could be. Thomas was a political nihilist who did whatever Henry VIII wanted, until he failed to anticipate the mercurial monarch and lost his head. Oliver was a bit of a fanatic, though with a few decent instincts (he stopped the looting of the royal tombs, and saved Westminster Abbey from demolition).

Joseph Jsoe • 4 years ago

Oliver was a genocider of the Irish, not “a bit of a fanatic”.

Nestorian • 4 years ago

Criticism of ideologies that embody millenarianism without God is all well and good. The problem is that the various politically conservative ideologies that also nominally orient themselves around a Judeo-Christian worldview consistently turn a blind eye to grave evils committed by members of the societal elites, in the name of whatever political and economic ideology they support instead.

There is an absence of a courageously prophetic stand for truth and justice on the part of Christian elites and intellectuals. It so happens that many of the parties making such critiques adhere to an ideology embodying secular messianism, and this is then employed as a rationalization by Christian intellectuals to turn a blind eye to the evils in question in the service of their own pet political ideology.

Here are ongoing examples right now, picked almost at random, where such a prophetic witness is lacking:

- The ongoing slaughter and mass starvation in Yemen being caused by Saudi Arabia, and supported by the United States
- The betrayal of the Kurds (if being true to the promises made to them must come at the expense of American geopolitical interests, then this is what the Christian moral witness necessitates)
- The ongoing criminal violation of anti-trust laws by the medical industry involved in their refusal to make public the costs of their services
- The homicidal criminality of the Boeing executives who knowingly put a death-trap airliner into global circulation
- The homicidal drug-dealing criminality of pharmaceutical company executives who knowingly caused the opoiod crisis by employing a business model built on deliberately addicting people

Secular messianism would lose a lot of its appeal and raison d'etre if the Christian intelligentsia would take from the secular messianists, and take upon themselves, the task of prophetically denouncing the criminality routinely engaged in by their society's power elite.

C. L. H. Daniels • 4 years ago

No one is bearing prophetic witness to those things, to use your term. Only a few Cassandras here and there. It's not just our Christian elites that fail here, it's all of them, left, right and center.

Sean Dougherty • 4 years ago

Precisely. SJW-ism gains traction because at it’s core it does not challenge neo-liberalism.

Brasidas • 4 years ago

Preach it brother..

rob • 4 years ago

A picture is worth a thousand words. While it used to be that Communists were demeaned by associating with homosexuality, now homosexuals are demeaned by association with communism.