Repression

A conservative blog by an anonymous right wing academic announced that it had been suppressed, shortly after he was outed. And then, predictably, the announcement of censorship was itself censored. The original announcement of the end read:

I hesitated in writing this, but I have two choices at this point: 1) open political activism including this blog, 2) my career. I don’t want to get into too many details here, but I was given this choice…. I want to thank everyone from the bottom of my heart for reading, commenting and encouraging me to continue. Thank you all for your messages of support of my efforts, which will now be at the grass roots level only. I want to make it clear that in no way am I burned out (almost 3 years now I have kept a consistent pace). In fact, I am more energized than ever. I also do not blame my employer. They are doing what they see is in the best interest of the institution.

Which was promptly revised to:

 Due to yet anther media inquiry by a lefty ‘journalist’ pretending to be middle-of-the-road, let me just be clear that I work for the best employer there is, and this will help me do my job better. I made this decision on my own. And that’s all there is to it.

“I was given a choice” disappeared from the blog.

This is theocracy: In theocracy, the state enforces the rule of the priests, that no one can disagree with the priests, and the priests endorse the state, the high priesthood being Harvard and the federal bureaucracy, such as the secret science manufactured by the EPA.

If the theocracy is diffuse, rather than having all power concentrated in a single high priest, pope, or holy King, an unintended side effect of theocracy is that in the course of coercing the rest of society the theocracy coerces itself to become ever more extreme.

Over time, a theocracy tends to become ever more extreme, and the more extreme it becomes, the faster it becomes extreme, forming a political singularity until anti theocratic reaction ends it, as with Pinochet or the Thermidorian reaction, or until a single leader takes total power in the theocracy, as with Stalin, who can unilaterally set the orthodoxy of the theocracy without himself being coerced.

Stalin is often interpreted as the originator of the great terror, but that is not how Russian history looks to me. Rather, my interpretation of events is that the state under the Czars started leaning moderate left, which led to the state leaning immoderate left, which led to the overthrow of the Czars by social democracy, which continued to lean ever further left leading to communist coup against social democracy, and the state continuing to lean ever further left, until it started to look like the state would wind up murdering every single Soviet subject for failure to be sufficiently left, and at this point Stalin seized despotic power in order to halt the terror. We don’t see Stalin urging the party to commit terror. Instead, we see him publishing papers such as “giddy with success” intended to persuade the party to calm down and ease up. It looks to me that the Soviet terror was the spontaneous outcome of the natural dynamics of theocracy, and despotism was needed to break the cycle of extremism leading to ever greater extremism. Stalin saved the party from murdering everyone in the Soviet Union including party members, or rather saved the party from murdering everyone in the Soviet Union especially party members

The French revolution shows all these tendencies. Under the monarchy, rightism was repressed, for example the doctrine that the races of man were separate species became dangerous to one’s career. The suppression of rightism and the encouragement of leftism lead to the collapse of the monarchy, and eventually to the terror, which led to the red terror, which was ended by the Thermidorian reaction.

The first amendment was intended to prevent this kind of problem, but the first amendment is now being worked around in various ways:  For example speech gets defined as money, making campaign finance laws applicable as happened to Kirk Shelmerdine.  Admission to better universities requires the plausible appearance of left wing views, and students are from time catechized, and need to give politically correct answers in those catechisms.  Businesses are subject to discrimination lawsuits if they employ people who disapprove of affirmative action – it is not sufficient that a business practice affirmative action, it must do so sincerely believing in the rightness off affirmative action.

And, as with the commerce cause, the more grounds that have been discovered to set aside the first amendment, the more grounds that will be discovered – a problem that cannot be remedied until both sides have had their turn being suppressed.  There will never again be support for the first amendment until the left has experienced a Sulla or a Pinochet.

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21 Responses to “Repression”

  1. bgc says:

    You say ‘theocracy’ like its a bad thing!

    You say ‘religion’ like it doesn’t make any difference which!

    This is analysis from a perspective that God/ gods is all nonsense – just manipulative social control.

    Why on earth would you want to call mid-twentieth century atheist anti-religious totalitarianism regimes by the name of ‘theocracy’?

    Come on – you can do better than that!

    • Steve Johnson says:

      Until God starts directly speaking to people theocracy will be a bad idea because in practice it means rule by priests. The original post outlined exactly why this is a bad idea when there is no explicitly written doctrine to follow.

    • jim says:

      You say ‘religion’ like it doesn’t make any difference which!

      If the religion has a moderate and humane holy book one might expect it to be limited in how bad it gets by fidelity to the text, so some theocracies are doubtless inherently worse than others. The least bad theocracy was arguably Byzantium, where everyone spoke Greek, the language of the New Testament.

      Why on earth would you want to call mid-twentieth century atheist anti-religious totalitarianism regimes by the name of ‘theocracy’?

      There is a reason why they call communism “the god that failed”. The religious nature of communism is obvious to ex communists, however unobvious it may be to non communists and communists alike.

      • bgc says:

        @Jim – yes I know ‘they’ call it that – but isn’t it weird?

        Rule by God – but without God…

        It is like science without truth, art without beauty, morality which is a simple inversion of traditional virtue – all very characteristic 20th century kinds of thing…

        And not a state of affairs that we really ought to accept – or at least not without pointing-out the weirdness.

  2. RS says:

    > And, as with the commerce cause, the more grounds that have been discovered to set aside the first amendment, the more grounds that will be discovered

    “To see a world in a grain of sand…”

  3. […] Jim thinks we need a dictator. […]

  4. Tschafer says:

    Holy Crap! Considering that Stalin killed somewhere between 15-17 million, how in the Hell many do you guys think that Trotsky would have killed? It’s always been my impression that Stalin veered left and right, always in order to maximize power.

    • Alrenous says:

      Which implies they think that Trotsky would have veered solidly left. Sadly I don’t know enough to weigh in more than that, but keep it up gents, good show.

    • jim says:

      My impression is that Trotsky, like Pol Pot, would have been swept along by events, the events that Stalin from time to time tried to slow down, and Trotsky would have failed to notice that a major fraction of the Soviet population was somehow not around any more.

      Saints are dangerous in that way. Hitler set out to kill all the Jews, but Pol Pot did not set out to kill all the intellectuals and everyone who looked like an intellectual and anyone who got in the way. It just somehow worked out that way. Indeed I am sure that if anyone told a Khmer Rouge party member that the party was going to kill all the intellectuals, and horribly torture all the foreign educated intellectuals to death he would have laughed and said “But we are intellectuals, and most of us, for example Comrade Pol Pot himself, are foreign educated intellectuals!”

    • jim says:

      It’s always been my impression that Stalin veered left and right,

      In the face of a party veering ever leftwards.

  5. Bill says:

    Stalin seized despotic power in order to halt the terror

    One of the most underappreciated facts of commie history is that in the fight between the Stalinists and the Trotskyites, the Stalinists were both the right wingers and the good guys.

    • Occupant says:

      Careful.

      Stalinists were not good guys. The were just less insane and blood-crazed than the Trotskyites.

      “The only good thing that Stalin did
      was to put an ice pick in Trotsky’s head”

      • jim says:

        I am sure that is what he meant: That the Stalinists were relatively good and relatively right wing, compared to what was coming down.

  6. observor says:

    but also give you atheists’ credit 4 not wanting to step on anybody’s dreams, fevers, or presumptions, (

  7. observor says:

    as a god fearing Episcopalian, i’d hurt anyone of you atheists with your own beliefs & hallucinations — leftists: property comes first … then awareness.

    ~foghorn, leghorn, the third

  8. red says:

    I’ve been telling my friends for a while now that we live in a theocracy. Nothing else explains PC and knowing the right words to chat prevent being fired. But they simply can’t see it. Theocracy is what’s always coming from the Christin right and when it’s upon them from the left they simply can’t connect the words together.

    They ask: How can it be a theocracy without a god? They say: But no one forces us to believe! Which of course is true. No one and I mean no one actually believe the horse shit we are forced to repeat to keep ourselves safe. We simply have no frame of reference for living in real theocracy. The only examples of theocracy are half assed Marxist history lessons about Christianity.

    No one reads is the problem. Everything everyone knows is bite sized Marxist propaganda pretending to free and open truth. How can people know the truth as long as their history books are filled with nothing but lies? We learn little tid bits here and there but we don’t check the volumes written before the party. And like in 1984 the truth is sent down the insulator and it’s replaced by bite sized Wikipedia propaganda articles.

    Hell even Wikipedia is being newspeaked down everyday. Instead of destroying words they delete contented. I used to read historical entries in Wikipedia that would have view points on a events from 5 different perspectives without distortions in editing to point to one as the official view. I got more info from Wikipedia than I could from a stack of history books. Now read the same article and 60% of the content is gone.

    The early computer geeks put everything in Wikipedia. Geeks care about one thing: Information. Everything gets included. But today the articles get shorter and shorter. The different perspectives are replaced by the official view and truncated and inaccurate alternative view designed to be dismissed out of hand by the readers. Wikipeda was the greatest gift given by geeks to the world. A life times worth of knowledge at our fingertips and they fucking burned it down for fucking propaganda that not even the high priests really believe.

    • jim says:

      Buddhism, in some versions, has zero gods, and when it has lots of gods they are rather peripheral to the religion. New Age theoretically has lots of gods, but the gods do not matter much since New Agers attribute to people the the functions and capabilities normally ascribed to gods.

      Thus religion does not need gods to be religious.

    • PRCalDude says:

      But they simply can’t see it. Theocracy is what’s always coming from the Christin right and when it’s upon them from the left they simply can’t connect the words together.

      That’s right. The nothing will turn us around or prevent the inevitable. The inevitable is, after all, the inevitable.

      I sort-of laugh when people say they’re conservatives nowadays because what is it they’re trying to conserve? I can see why liberals would want to be conservative since they’ve completely vanquished their foes on the right, but not those on the former right.

    • nydwracu says:

      “They ask: How can it be a theocracy without a god?”

      This is a reflection of a very convenient (to them, anyway) bug in our semantic field, a bug which Mencius Moldbug has a patch for: http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2008/06/ol9-how-to-uninstall-cathedral.html

      • jim says:

        Moldbug’s soft reset is the separation of information and state, a libertarian program I first heard advocated over thirty years ago.

        His hard reset is the dissolution of the monasteries – which worked, and had very long lasting effects.

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