Wokefolk

Nazi Analogies

So many stories!  In this Cato one,   I bet the backstory is important.  My bet would be that Cato wanted to get rid of him anyway, and used this as an excuse. 

It's melodramatic, but it reminds me of Hitler's Night of the Long Knives, which I've just been reading about.  He  purged the Brownshirts, the  left wing of the Nazi Party.  The same night, he also killed miscellaneous others--- a retired old party rival and  right-wing former Chancellor Schleicher and former prime minister of Bavaria Kahr. Nobody paid those murders any attention in the general confusion and the general happiness over the Brownshirts getting killed. 

[https://reason.com/2021/01/22/niskanen-center-will-wilkinson-lynch-mike-pence-tweet-cancel-culture/?fbclid=IwAR022OimEPT7eXLJU_DhEFpMBpChB3yA9A2x9rO1LAw7PX0SNCRb5sEgR0Q djk Will Wilkinson fired]

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The Christian believes that all men are sinners, including himself, and  no man becomes morally perfect.  The liberal, however, adopts the following poem as his guideline: 

I'm just great,
And so are you,
But look at what those people do! --- The Christian is as quick as the liberal to condemn wickedness, but he has more sympathy for the wicked. --- Quote Investigator tells me that my inspiration for this is not quite original with Senator Russell Long, and he didn't say it quite as well, but here it is:

Don't tax you,
And don't tax me,
Tax that man behind the tree. --- Remember Professor Spiegel's Little Hitler song on You-tube.

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 A Trinity College club disinvited Richard Dawkins when they found he'd spoken against Islam.  The change is that now it's not enough to hate Christianity-- you must also keep quiet about Islam. General atheism is no longer a safe leftwing opinion to advocate publicly, tho you are *required* to hold it privately, unless you are an Arab or otherwise have an ethnic background for which Islam is considered an appropriate decoration.  

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  Rod Dreher in Evil Progressive Adoption Politics passes along these comments from someone: 

The latter pillar, the reduction of all human relations to plain power dynamics — literally the Leninist “ Кто? Кого?” concept — conceives of a parent-child relationship exactly as it does a boss-worker relationship, or a ruler-ruled relationship. What normal people perceive as welcoming a child into their homes in the course of an adoption, these ideologues understand as an acquisition or a conquest. (Here see Dr Ibram X Kendi’s now-infamous tweet, endorsed by fellow racial essentialist Richard Spencer, characterizing the “colonizer” quality of the Barrett family’s adoptions.)

In the Chinese-adoption sphere, these are almost entirely young women in their twenties, who profess progressive politics, and will often acknowledge that they came to their critique — of their own parents and families — in the course of ideological indoctrination at college. Sustained engagement with this cohort reveals fairly quickly that the overwhelming majority of them appropriate the jargon and concepts of progressive race- and power-obsession to engage in re-litigation of entirely ordinary personal passages. Questions of self, meaning, parents, and nascent adulthood that rightly occupy the attention of anyone from ages 15 to 25 are subordinated to the rigid ideological strictures — and pre-ordained answers — of progressive cant.

For those willing to go down the rabbit hole, search for a Facebook group called Transracial Adoption Perspectives. It isn’t the only progressive transracial-adoption group out there, but it is the one most popular with the Chinese-adoption community. (The other big one, simply called Transracial Adoption, has a Group Rules list jam-packed with identitarian jargon, “lived experience” and all, that must be seen to be believed.) Then search for a Facebook group called TAP 101: this is the introductory / indoctrination group where one must spend several weeks before permission is granted to join Transracial Adoption Perspectives. Only after demonstrating willingness to acquiesce to progressive concepts and rhetoric in full — and, for adoptive parents, to submit to what is effectively ritualistic humiliation and formal reprogramming — does the inner sanctum open up.

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Everybody trusts big corporations most, then government, then individuals, even though most people would probably *say* the opposite. We know this because they pay lots of money to big corporations for products whose quality they must trust and they are surprised and dismayed if a company doesn't keep its promises.

More generally, though, people very often say they believe things when their actions show they do not (I define "believe" as meaning opinions that determine action, rather than what people say, and distinguish it from "thinking I believe" even if that thinking is sincere).

A general phenomenon of huge political importance is that many people do *not* use their personal experience in forming their stated beliefs, and many of them do not even use it in forming their true beliefs. With corporations, people ignore how Amazon always delivers the goods when they give Amazon money in their stated beliefs about corporate ethics, but they actually trust Amazon much more than an individual or a mom-and-pop online outfit. In other cases, even their true beliefs are at variance with personal experience. Covid-19 is the great example. I know so many people who are deathly afraid but who don't know anybody within 50 miles who has died, been hospitalized, or even had symptoms worse than a cold-- or, in some cases, don't even know anyone who's tested positive. People are convinced they're surrounded by white supremacists, even though they've never met one. That other people and they themselves are racist, even though they can't detect it except with an implicit bias test. That food X is bad for you in immediate, obvious, ways, even though they've had lots of personal contact with it and never seen the bad effect.

Close study of Bacon's Idols of the Mind would help. People get caught up in false paradigms to the extent of ignoring not just scholarly evidence, but their own eyes.

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Lost in CambodiaWhy did a radical British professor become a cheer-leader for Pol Pot? And why was he murdered on the very day he'd met the brutal dictator? Andrew Anthony on the extraordinary life and death of Malcolm Caldwell Andrew Anthony Sat 9 Jan 2010

Most of all, while other supporters had wavered, Caldwell had remained steadfast. Only months before, he had written an article in the Guardian, rubbishing reports of a Khmer Rouge genocide. He cited Hu Nim, the Kampuchean Information Minister, who blamed the deaths on America. Caldwell was unaware that Hu had himself already been tortured to death in one of Pol Pot's execution centres. Such killings that the Khmer Rouge had committed, argued the peace activist, were of "arch-Quislings who well knew what their fate would be were they to linger in Kampuchea".
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It speaks eloquently of the Khmer Rouge's achievements that, while Angkor Wat remains the country's main tourist attraction, the next most popular sights for visitors are Tuol Sleng and the Killing Fields at Choeung Ek, where the prisoners from S-21 were taken to be "smashed" – usually with an ox-cart axle. ... In his book Voices From S-21, the historian David Chandler quotes Milan Kundera's phrase (used to describe the Soviet bloc secret police) of "punishment seeking the crime" to sum up the prison's project. To this end, the most depraved techniques – electric shocks, rape, the forced eating of excrement, medical experimentation, flaying, and lethal blood extraction – were employed. It's hard to comprehend that these agonies were not just formalities, they were preliminaries. It wasn't a question, on arriving at the prison, that an inmate would be lucky to get out alive. He or she would be lucky to get out just dead. ... The Cambodian People's Party, which has ruled since Pol Pot was overthrown, is led by onetime Khmer Rouge members who, under threat of purging, had defected to Vietnam. One of these is Hun Sen, a former revolutionary soldier, who has been prime minister since 1985. His government was accused by Amnesty International of widespread torture of political prisoners, using "electric shock, hot irons and near suffocation with plastic bags". And for many years, senior former members of Pol Pot's government lived under protection in Cambodia, some with family links to the government. So there were several reasons why a major trial with international media coverage was potentially embarrassing or inconvenient.

After much pressure, in November 2007 the Cambodians finally arrested the four most senior surviving Khmer Rouge leaders: Nuon Chea, Ieng Sary, Ieng Thirith and Khieu Samphan. Their trial is scheduled to start in 2011, though few observers will be surprised if it is indefinitely delayed. All of them claim ignorance of any wrong-doing. Perhaps the most galling example is a long letter of evasion and self-justification that Khieu Samphan, Pol Pot's chief ideologue, wrote to Cambodian newspapers in 2001. "I do not see any importance in bringing up this tragic past. We would be better off to let everyone be at peace so that all of us can carry on our daily tasks… I tried my best for the sake of our nation's survival, so that we might enjoy development and prosperity like other nations. I am so surprised that this turned out to be mass murder."

Academic Studies

"individuals high in Need for Chaos (desire for a new beginning through the destruction of order and established structures) do not hold idealistic political visions...Rather, they focus on achieving status and recognition for themselves." The"Need for Chaos" and Motivations to Share Hostile Political Rumors," 2020.

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