The Very Old Lineage of Wokeist Tactics.
Posted by Ed Folsom, May 16, 2024.
The left never changes its core themes and language. I stumbled across the pro-communist passages quoted below recently, taken from a 1954 report of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. The passages were lifted from texts that were located in reading rooms at U.S. Information Centers overseas in the 1950’s, paid for by U.S. tax payers, ostensibly to combat communism. Of course, if the point of the leftist project is to promote socialism and the one-true-path to the communist end of history – as in Marxism and its variants – those themes and that language integral to the socialist/communist project must never change.
Where does all the talk about “privilege” come from that is integral to the dogma of Wokeness, DEI, and Critical Race Theory? It’s nothing new. As pro-communist writer Scott Nearing put it when describing the great communist project of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (a/k/a the Soviet Union, or U.S.S.R.) in his own materials located in one of those Cold War U.S. Information Centers:
“The Soviet Union was therefore the symbol of the popular triumph over privilege. Privilege, the world over, recognized the situation and did its best to destroy the Soviets. The overthrow of the Soviet Union would have meant a decisive and overwhelming victory for privilege.”
In this, we see the theme that all that is not Soviet Communism represents the triumph of privilege, which privilege was no doubt triumphing by oppressively oppressing the oppressed.
To this day, in leftism, socialism is still held up as “progress,” as it was in the 1950’s by pro-Soviet writer, James Allen:
“The Soviet Union plays the role of clearing the path, of facilitating world progress, of proving by its own example the superiority of the socialist system.”
And then, as now, the Marxist path – socialist awakening, emerging from the ruins of capitalism on the road to the communist promised land — was said to be the answer to racial tensions, as touted in this passage from pro-communist writer Eslanda Robeson:
“The one hopeful light on the horizon [was] the exciting and encouraging conditions in Soviet Russia, where for the first time in history our race problem has been squarely faced and solved.”
Ah, yes — All the Black Slavs and the Asian Slavs and the Hispanic Slavs and Pacific Islander Slavs suddenly began to live in harmony with the white Slavs in Soviet Russia, much as all the Black Chinese and the white Chinese and the Hispanic Chinese and the Pacific Islander Chinese later came to live in perfect harmony with the Han Chinese in Mao’s People’s Republic of China.
But leftists don’t just carry on their great project by holding themselves out as the face of progress, advancing the right side of History against privilege and racism. Consider the mileage they continue to get from the very old Communist Party theme that they are the only “anti-fascist” bulwark against “fascism.” This theme traces back at least to the 1920’s when the Soviet Socialists branded their political enemies, especially capitalists and capitalism, “fascist.”
As described in the Wikepedia entry on the topic located here :
“According to Norman Davies, the concept of “anti-fascism” as used by the KPD [the Communist Party of Germany] originated as an ideological construct of the Soviet Union, where the epithets fascist and fascism were primarily and widely used to describe capitalist society in general and virtually any anti-Soviet or anti-Stalinist activity or opinion.”
In this sense, nothing has changed except that the phrase“anti-Soviet or anti-Stalinist” should now be replaced by “anti-Woke or non-leftist/progressivist.”
As discussed in the same Wikipedia piece, the political group Antifa, itself, traces back to the German “Antifascist Action,” established in 1932, as a Communist front, by the Communist Party of Germany, funded and directed by Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Communist Party. In fact, the aesthetic of the Antifa flag in current use originated with the German Antifascist Action. This organization was mainly concerned with battling the German Social Democratic Party, which it called “fascist.” Antifascist Action sometimes even acted in concert with Hitler’s National Socialist German Worker’s Party (the Nazis) to clash with members of the Social Democratic Party, which Antifascist Action and the Soviets saw as their chief rival in Germany.
As a side note, this collaboration foreshadowed the later Hitler/Stalin nonaggression pact, under which the Soviet Communists and the Nazis divided Poland between them and the Soviet Union was given dominion over the Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. That pact lasted from August of 1939 to June of 1941, during which time the Soviet Communists turned their propaganda efforts away from Nazi Germany and directed them against England, as the Soviet Union’s non-aggression pact partner, Nazi Germany, bombed the Engish.
Continuing with the Communist theme that all that is capitalist or otherwise non-communist is fascist, when the Soviets and the German Democratic Republic, a/k/a East Germany (Note the cynical use of the term “democratic” in its name), later collaborated to build a wall separating East Berlin from West Berlin in 1961, they officially named it the Antifaschistischer Schutzwall or Anti-fascist Protection Dike, continuing with the theme that communism was progress’s bulwark against fascism. Everything on the right side of History’s wall was communist. Everything on the wrong side was fascist. In this paradigm, it was downright righteous for East German authorities to arrest or shoot-on-sight anyone attempting to escape over or under the wall, fascists that they so obviously were.
To this day, Antifa in the U.S. present themselves as “anti-fascist,” as if standing as a bulwark against actual Nazis. During the “mostly peaceful” riots of 2020, Antifa’s deceptive name and marketing scheme caused many people to call themselves “anti-fascist,” thinking: Of course I’m against Nazis – who isn’t? — anyone who won’t declare themselves anti-fascist, and perhaps kneel in the streets before Black Lives Matter, must be fascist themselves. This is how leftism inverts and perverts, using the same language, themes and methods that communists have used to invert and pervert for 100 years.
Black Lives Matter benefited from similar leftist wordplay during the heady days of 2020’s “mostly peaceful” rioting. Who would dare to suggest that Black lives don’t matter? By creating the impression that they stand merely for the eminently reasonable and obvious proposition that the lives of Black people “matter,” Black Lives Matter placed themselves rhetorically on the side of the good guys, standing against all evil forces that might oppose the proposition.
Where do you suppose this wordplay strategy came from? Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Cullors has been open in stating that she and her fellow BLM organizers are what Cullors called “trained Marxists.”
In fact, before Black Lives Matter erased it from the “What We Believe” page of their website in 2020, the organization was open about wanting to rid us of the nuclear family, as a means of destroying the hierarchical foundations of capitalism – very Marxist/Communist, indeed. And Black Lives Matter even had people kneeling in the streets, struggle-session style, apparently buying into the propaganda that “silence is complicity” in all the violence perpetrated by a systemically racist AmriKKKa against all those Black lives that matter. These trained Marxists know some very old tricks.
Everything that Antifa and BLM did in 2020, and all that the Woke left does to this day, plays on the broader theme that America is a “systemically racist” country, born in the original sin of slavery that forever stains it with illegitimacy. The iteration of this theme currently playing itself out in our streets and on college campuses leans heavily on shrieking about “settlers” and “colonizers.”
This settler/colonizer stuff also plays-off Soviet and Chinese Communist cold war themes, when the Soviets and Chicoms portrayed themselves as would-be vanquishers of Western oppressor colonial powers acting on behalf of the colonized oppressed. All the while, the Soviet communists essentially colonized all of Central and Eastern Europe and much of Central Asia. But never mind that. I suppose we shouldn’t talk about Tibet either.
Of course the population of Central and Eastern Europe was and still is vastly comprised of white people. With all the oppression that was involved in Soviet subjugation of European and Central Asian populations, the Soviets oppressed almost no Black, Hispanic or Pacific Islander people. So, racially speaking, it was all cool.
On the other hand, the settlers and colonizers from the capitalist West were and will always remain categorically evil because they oppressed and subjugated non-whites. In fact, in the U.S., we not only settled and colonized, but we enslaved Black people. As the left likes to tell the story, nobody else on earth, either before, during or after, ever enslaved Black people like they did in AmeriKKKa. For the U.S., the only path to redemption is a complete leftist overhaul – a fundamental transformation, as some have described it.
It’s a funny thing, but until I recently read The Lumumba Plot: The Secret History of the CIA and a Cold War Assassination, about the Congolese politician Patrice Lumumba, I had no idea that Lumumba’s people were continually enslaved by other Africans right up until 1885. That’s the year the Belgians colonized Congo and abolished the practice, a full 20 years after slavery was abolished in the United States. How long did slavery exist in the United States of America? Although the American colonies declared independence in 1776, the colonies were merely banded together in a loose relationship under Articles of Confederation until the Constitution was ratified in 1789. Between 1776 and 1783, the colonies had their hands full fighting their war of independence from Britain. It wasn’t until March of 1789 that the first United States Congress met, and it wasn’t until April of 1789 that George Washington became the first President.
From this, we can see that slavery in the United States existed in some of its states – certainly not all — for 76 years. For the last 4 years of it, from 1861 to 1865, Americans were busy ending the practice of slavery at a significant cost of roughly 620,000 killed in the Civil War. Before 1789, slavery existed in British colonies located in a portion of what is now the United States of America from 1619 onward. In other words, slavery existed under British colonial rule, on land that is now part of the U.S., for more than 150 years. But the Brits aren’t the ones who get the bad rap for it.
The history of slavery is, of course, much older than that. There are records of slavery existing as far back as 3500 B.C. Muslims in Spain took Slavic people as slaves in the ninth century, which is where the term “slave” originates. And slavery continued in many Islamic countries well into the 20th century. Yet, for some reason, to hear it from a Wokeist it is uniquely impossible for America to erase the stain of its period of slavery without a total leftist deconstruction, transformation, and strict adherence to the ever-shifting Wokeist catechism on the one true path to Woke redemption. That must be because, as the Wokeists never tire of telling us these days, America is “systemically racist.”
America is the world’s great bastion of capitalism. Remember, communists since the time of Joseph Stalin have labeled capitalism “fascist.” In this formulation, given that “fascism” means all the bad stuff, including racism, America will continue to be systemically racist unless its capitalist system is uprooted. But how else, apart from knowing that America is capitalist, do we know that America is systemically racist? Here, the leftists string us up by our own stated principles.
Antonio Gramsci was an Italian communist imprisoned by Benito Mussolini until his death in 1937. During his imprisonment, he thought and wrote a lot about how to advance the great socialist/communist project. While he saw a benefit in teaching communism’s inevitability under the historical process outlined by Marx and Engels, he also saw a downside to it. While the idea of historical inevitability serves to fortify the communist flock during its struggle, it also tends to make the flock complacent. After all, if history’s laws already dictate communism’s inevitability, why should anyone bother to struggle to bring it about?
In Gramsci’s view, the flock should be struggling hard, but in practical ways, not doctrinaire ways. Gramsci admired Niccolo Machiavelli for his cold-eyed assessments of political reality. Gramsci urged his fellow communists to study what makes the politics tick in any given place where they seek to gain control — to do what works to make the audience cooperate.
Here in America, we’re all about equality. For instance, our Declaration of Independence declares:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
But for a moment ignore that the concept that everyone is created equal is set in the context of everyone being endowed by the Creator with unalienable right that include life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. If we set that aside, and If everyone is born equal, how can unequal outcomes occur unless systemic social and economic conditions are holding some people back – oppression – while providing an advantage to others — privilege?
Since all outcomes are not equal in America, America must be systemically biased against those who have worse outcomes and in favor of those who have better outcomes. Under this view, all that is required to prove systemic bias and oppression is to demonstrate unequal outcomes, especially between groups. Different outcomes for different racial groupings? Systemic racism. Different outcomes between the sexes? Systemic sexism. Etc. Since no two people are born identical in all respects, none are ever equal in all respects.
For Wokeists, seeking to maximize dissention and to destabilize a society in which all consider themselves equal, few things are more effective than constantly harping on unequal group results as ironclad proof of various systemic isms. All they need to do is to curate the right sets of groupings for comparison purposes, place their wedges wherever it’s most advantageous to place them, and point to the disparate outcomes. Voila! Systemic ___ism is everywhere in this fundamentally flawed system!
Gramsci would have understood that harping on the unfairness of unequal outcomes as evidence of systemic bias would particularly resonate with Americans. Before America, everything was kings, queens, emperors, ruling castes, and the people who were ruled. We were the first in modern history to govern ourselves without royalty. It’s in our blood to view ourselves as equals. Leftist have hit upon an ingenious hack of this central social/political tenet!
Actually, this central tenet and its prospects for exploitation were noticed long ago by none other than Alexis de Toqueville in his study, Democracy in America. Toqueville observed that a belief in equality might fortify a person to strive and out-compete others instead of viewing oneself as too far below others to have any chance of success. On the other hand, belief in inherent equality might lead a majority who see themselves as having less than others to react by taking from those who have more, leveling things by bringing the others down to their level. Toqueville also noted that a people’s love for equality is an open door to despotism, observing:
“The first, and in a way the only, necessary condition for arriving at centralizing public power in a democratic society is to love equality or to make it believed [that one does]. Thus the science of despotism, formerly so complicated, is simplified: it is reduced, so to speak, to a single principle.”
Who has ever claimed to love equality more than the leftists, the Wokeists, the progressivists, the socialists, the communists who have forever denounced America as fundamentally, systemically exploitative, racist, sexist, oppressive, colonizing, capitalist, fascist, __ist, __ist, __ist? Leftist despots will never change in this regard. They will always envision themselves as calling the shots in their new order, in which many will always remain more equal than others, but in which they are certain that they will be the most equal of all.
I bring this up because, this being an election year here in the U.S., we’ll be hearing and seeing a lot more from them. Just so you know a bit about their lineage. And, by the way, their 20th Century death-count was astronomical.
