At the suggestion of David Frum, I'm currently reading It Was a Long Time Ago, and It Never Happened Anyway: Russia and the Communist Past. David Satter's book is a fascinating look at the crimes of the Soviet Union and the inability of the Russian people to fully cope with the crimes of the Stalinists.*
There's a line early on that perfectly, and briefly, encapsulates the horror of totalitarianism. It comes in a section about the Stalinist purges, during which the Communists turned on each other and wantonly murdered those who were deemed to have failed to get with the program:
The purpose of the terror was to force individuals to live and react as if the precepts of the ruling idea actually reflected reality. In this sense, the Soviet terror can be seen as the attempt of political actors, on the scale of a vast nation, to liquidate the truth. [Emphasis mine.]
Those who survive a totalitarian regime are those who are best able to simply accept new realities when the higher ups demand a change. Questioning is forbidden, as is logically trying to work your way through the new idea. Acceptance is all that matters. Fear is used to not only stifle debate but to actively shape the way you think.
I couldn't help but think of the way the far left acts on Twitter when I read that sentence.** You saw it in Michelle Goldberg's fantastic piece for the Nation: Some left-wing activists are literally afraid to discuss some topics in the fear of violating a hidden norm that they had failed to be aware of. Good intentions and a history of thinking all the "right" things are no defense when you run afoul of whatever new idea reflects that day's reality.
We saw a perfect example of this type of sordid drama play out last night and this morning, when Oliver Willis, one of Media Matters' resident hacks, got caught in the buzzsaw. Allow us to stifle our schadenfreude for a moment—it is always amusing to watch the left eat their own, never moreso than when one of those being eaten is an architect of the system destroying him—and instead focus on how insane the whole thing is.
What unspeakably horrible thing did Willis do to earn the anger of the Twitter mob? He dared point out that most people, even those on the left, are completely and utterly ignorant of the way transgendered (or "trans*" because we need to make these things as difficult as possible) activists demand their issues be discussed, so, you know, maybe cut people a little slack when they don't know what ridiculous additions to the language like "cisgender" mean?***
Oliver Willis: History's greatest monster.
Now, again, Willis is the sort of guy who spends all his time disingenuously attacking the right as racist and sexist and homophobic. You'd think he'd be safe. But, of course, there's nothing the totalitarian hates more than those on his own side with insufficient fervor. So when Willis tried to cisplain**** to all the trans activists and their allies that some people don't know what in the hell they're prattling on about, well, he was first against the wall.
"how am i sposed to know the right terms? it hasn't come up. this stuff hasn't been mainstream [all the sics]," he complained. But the revolutionary fails to understand that ignorance is no excuse. As a result, he was denounced for his bigotry. He was accused of ignoring the transgendered. He was vilified for telling an oppressed minority how to behave. You can check out his Twitter feed if you like; I don't have the strength to do a whole Twitchy.
The point isn't so much to feel sorry for Willis as to note the rigid totalitarianism of the modern left. Loyalty to the idea du jour is all that matters. And questioning it or suggesting other ways to accomplish the goal of the idea—that is, mansplaining or whitesplaining or cisplaining—is literally the single worst thing you can do. Because the revolutionary understands better than most that when you start questioning an idea, you might discover its hollowness.
*An excerpt from Larry Danielson's Amazon review: "I wish I had two more hands so I could give this horribly unfair book four thumbs down."
**Probably unnecessary caveat: The act of murdering and starving tens of millions of people is obviously worse than trying to enforce conformity on Twitter.
***As a friend whom I will not name has noted on Facebook, we have a perfectly acceptable word to describe 98 percent of the population: "normal."
****Like "mansplain," but, you know, about gender or whatever.
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