The Conservative Blind Spot

"The Unhumans Are Coming" | by John Leake, Courageous Discourse

Review of "Unhumans: The Secret History of Communist Revolutions (and How to Crush Them)" by @JackPosobiec , @JoshuaLisec , foreword by Stephen K. Bannon

When I was in graduate school I wrote my master’s thesis on the nature and history of political revolutions. As part of my research I read Dostoevsky’s Demons, which tells the story of a fictional town consumed by chaos when it becomes the launchpad of an attempted revolution led by a master manipulator named Pyotr Verkhovensky. The novel portrays characters who seem to be possessed by demons.

I also read The Master and Margarita, by Mikhail Bulgakov, which tells the story of Satan visiting the Soviet Union. Only years later did I learn that the book inspired Mick Jagger to write “Sympathy for the Devil” with the terrifying verses:

“Stuck around St. Petersburg

When I saw it was a time for a change

Killed Tsar and his ministers

Anastasia screamed in vain

I rode a tank

Held a general's rank

When the blitzkrieg raged

And the bodies stank”

I recently thought of these verses—as well as Dostoevsky’s Demons—as I read Unhumans: The Secret History of Communist Revolutions (and How to Crush Them), by Jack Posobiec, Joshua Lisec, Stephen K. Bannon. The authors make a pretty good case that the people historically known as “revolutionaries” or “communists” are best understood NOT by the ideological doctrine they espouse, but by the emotions they harbor—namely, resentment, a sense of grievance, and a desire to destroy institutions and people. As the authors see it, the fact that communist revolutionaries have murdered tens of millions of people is a feature and not a bug of their approach to the world.

Readers already familiar with the blood-soaked history of the French and Russian Revolutions will not be surprised by the authors’ accounts of these episodes. They also present vivid and detailed accounts the Spanish Civil War, the Chinese Civil War and Cultural Revolution, and America’s 1960s Revolution and Culture War.

Most terrifying is their plausible demonstration that the spirit that animated these past horrors has been gathering strength in the United States for the last twenty years. This is the most relevant part of the book.

In 1995, when I wrote my master’s thesis on Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, I knew the destructive spirit that Burke described still lurked in the hearts and minds of many academics around me in Boston, but I assumed we’d reached a moment in American history when their ideas were destined henceforth to remain in the intellectual ghetto of college campuses.

Just three years earlier, Francis Fukuyama had published his widely read book The End of History in which he heralded the final triumph of Western liberal, representative government with strict limitations on state power.

My teacher and thesis advisor, Roger Scruton, often struck me as excessively gloomy in his utterances and writings about the Left and its undying ambition to destroy institutions, beauty, and truth. At the time I wondered if he was getting old and cranky. I now realize that he was right—the radical Left was resolutely continuing its “long march through the institutions” (as the German student activist Rudi Dutschke described the strategy in 1967).

On a personal note, it seems to me that the fortunes of Cultural Marxism since 2000 have been wildly boosted by the corrupt excesses of Wall Street, especially during the aftermath of the Financial Crisis of 2008. A great paradox and irony is the fact that Barack Obama’s first cabinet was entirely composed of people who were recommended to Obama’s campaign manager (John Podesta) by a Citigroup executive named Michael Froman.

When Froman’s e-mail containing his recommendations was published by Wikileaks, it strengthened my perception that Woke Ideology partly serves as a mechanism for distracting and dividing everyone in the country who does not work in the financial industry. The objective of this strategy is to direct everyone’s resentments at each other, and not at the financial class, which has amassed immense wealth through the financialization of everything instead of producing anything. It’s a salient fact that Obama’s Attorney General, Eric Holder, did not prosecute a single major Wall Street executive for any of their fraudulent and deceptive practices that led directly to the Mortgage Backed Securities meltdown of 2008.

From the point of view of the 1%, it’s better for poor black men and women to direct their anger at rural white plumbers (who like Trump) instead of at rich asset owners who adorned their yards with Obama-Biden and later Biden-Harris campaign signs.

The authors of Unhumans are most illuminating in their criticism of American conservatives for consistently failing to understand the true nature of the Leftist’s game. As they put it:

Our thesis is that the conservative movement has failed to conserve anything worth conserving. This is why we are in the situation we currently find ourselves in, and it is in fact a state of learned helplessness. Conservatives, centrists, and the right wing lose to the Left because they do not fundamentally understand the Left. Let this be a software upgrade to all who read this. The Cultural Marxist knows that the conservative will cry foul. The conservative will lash out with angry tweets about double standards and hypocrisy. But the Cultural Marxist does not care. The Cultural Marxist views everyone else as either unaware of the goal of the revolution, less than them, or an obstacle standing in their way to be destroyed. Only the revolution matters to the revolutionary. Conservatives have lost years of ground by being obsessed with debating “facts and logic” rather than doing the grubby work of entering institutions and remaking them from inside. The revolutionaries are a generation ahead in this regard. Conservatives are playing catch-up, and the hour is growing late. Time is short. Ultimately, the revolutionary does not care what the conservative says about them. They aren’t operating in good faith. These aren’t the unintentional consequences of good intentions. Conservatives need to wake up, and wake up now. This is a playbook that has been around longer than the United States itself. And we are reaching the endgame.

Read more:

petermcculloughmd.substack.com/p/the-unhumans…