On the day of the rope

On the alt right, a lot of people correctly observe that certain groups are all enemies, and conclude we have to hang them all, or give them all helicopter rides to the Pacific.

That is a lot of helicopter rides.

Does not follow.  A lot of these people are Havel’s Greengrocer, and will chant the new slogans as mindlessly as they chant the old, without even noticing that the slogans have changed.

In the English restoration, people in politically sensitive jobs – preachers, university professors, etc, were invited to reapply for jobs similar to the jobs that they had before the restoration, at similar pay, but these offers were conditional on “conformity”.  So in the job interview, one had to display the same enthusiasm for the new political correctness as for the old, and most announced that they had always believed what they now believed in the post restoration job interview, despite the fact that in their pre restoration job they had had to enthusiastically display the opposite beliefs.

Seems to me that the English restoration was a huge success.  It eventually, after a long time, came apart, as all things come apart, but this was not due to any failure in the early purges.  It was failure to continue the early purges.  They stopped monitoring people in politically sensitive jobs for apostasy.

William Wilberforce should have been enslaved for apostacy and sold to cut sugar cane in the Caribbean, and if that had been done to him and the entire Clapham church, all of them that were in politically sensitive jobs, the British Empire would still be doing fine.

The dangerous ones are not Havel’s Greengrocer.  The dangerous ones are the ones who sincerely and strongly believe one thing, and conspire with other people believing that thing, while pro forma saying they believe a different thing – entryists.  You need an organization to watch for entryists in governmental and quasi governmental jobs (banking, universities, foundations, ngos, and major media), an inquisition, which takes stern measures against them, but you don’t want to put Havel’s Greengrocer through the inquisition.

The policy of the Spanish Inquisition was that if people said they believed what they were supposed to believe, and superficially acted as if they believed it, they were fine.  The Spanish inquisition did not torture people till they confessed.  It tortured people till they stopped confessing.  If someone was obviously practicing and advocating different religion, while claiming to adhere to the official religion, they would make him confess his “error”, confess that he was supposedly a sincere adherent of the official religion who had supposedly mistaken and misunderstood the beliefs and practices of the official religion, and give him a moderate punishment for his “error”, the purpose and the effect being primarily to make apostasy low status and economically unrewarding.  Unrepentant heretics, people who boldly claimed to be holier than the inquisition, they burned at the stake, but when you were in the hands of the Spanish Inquisition, it was mighty hard to stay unrepentant.  They knew that actually burning a heretic was a big win for heresy, so sought to avoid it as far as possible.

The Inquisition depicted in Warhammer 40 000 is very popular on the alt right, but the fictional Warhammer 40 000 Inquisition, unlike the Spanish Inquisition, is apt to arbitrarily torture and execute heretics without due process.  We need to be very careful to torture and execute the correct people.  No torturing Havel’s Greengrocer  (even if he is Jewish)!  Even if we don’t care about groceries, still a win for heretics.