I am by temperament resistant to authority, but am still left stunned by how little time it took to start building a better genocide.
An ex-Noo Yawkuh, I now live in a very blue community in a mostly libertarian state, and my younger self would have been shocked to find me grateful to have a Republican governor and developing, for the first time in my life, an appreciation for the 2nd Amendment. (Though such attestations should never be necessary, I voted for Obama twice-yes-twice, voted affirmatively for "none of the above" in 2016 and skipped 2020 altogether.)
I chose not to get vaxxed against the current Plague not out of any philosophical, religious (I ain't got no dogma) or political impetus, but for rational reasons--this thing ain't been tested long enough; dissenting scientists have been ruthlessly suppressed, which any normal person would find concerning; I've never gotten a flu shot either and consider this the same category of risk (I got the flu on my 30th birthday, lo these many decades ago, and it was a brutal week but illness gets ya like that sometimes. It's not the Crawling Eye, or something.)
And the reaction to people like me, in letters to the editor in our regional paper (where I was just one of two-count 'em two people to rationally lay out our reasons) would have made Goebbels proud. The paper's circulation encompasses two college towns and by God the intelligentsia have better pitchforks than the peasantry could dream of.
Leighton, you're one of the best essayists on meaningful subjects I've encountered. Live long and prosper.
This is not a drill. This is the real deal, and we acquiesce at our great peril.
I remember considerable emphasis in my formal education on how important it is to resist these sorts of totalitarian movements. I remember watching The Wave, the Stanford Prison Experiment documentary, the Milgram Experiments, etc. I remember reading about how the Nazis were enabled by people who remained quiet. I remember learning the dangers of group think and scapegoating. We learned how important it was to think critically and question authority.
But throughout it all, the threats were coded mostly as right-wing, at least in my Seattle schooling. I don't remember being introduced to, say, Solzhenitsyn. Through the simple trick of putting a leftist mask on totalitarianism and coding resistance as "right wing," "far right," "racist," "white supremacist," etc., almost all of my educated leftist friends and family eagerly abandoned the principles we were raised with and jumped right on the authoritarian bandwagon. It is so crude and obvious a trick, but the intelligentsia are either oblivious or willfully blind to the evil they are perpetuating.
Particularly with the advent of bank account freezing, not to mention the social and career costs of resisting, this adage has a lot of explanatory power these days:
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
― Upton Sinclair, I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked
I'd like to share a recent experience with Yelp. I started noticing that a large number of reviews had been removed, for "violating our terms." Then one of my reviews was removed, for "perpetuating negative cultural stereotypes." I wrote a review of a local Sbarro's where I was unable to order a meal because the server didn't speak English. I asked if someone else working there spoke English but no one did. I thought this was ridiculous so I wrote a negative review. This Sbarro's was in a large local shopping mall in a county that is 70 percent white non-hispanic. I don't think it is possible to shut down the flow of communication entirely, but there seem to be concerted efforts at the major websites and platforms to curate what we can see.
I do agree that recourse to the Emergency Measures Act is an overreach, but on the other hand I don't think Justin Trudeau is a very likely authoritarian leader. Some segments of the Western Canadian right have hated him since he got into politics, and this trucker convoy seems to have been organised by people of this persuasion. And the reason why they hate him really isn't anything to do with him personally, but rather because of their memory of his father. Pierre Trudeau was both much more competent and more authoritarian than Justin (indeed, he was Prime Minister when his government promulgated the War Measures Act during the October Crisis in 1970, which was a much greater authoritarian overreach than what we're seeing now), and in fact it seems to be Justin Trudeau's incompetence that eventually forced him to apply the Emergency Measures Act. In other words, it shouldn't have reached this point if the government had been competent.
What I find interesting is that the left-wing New Democratic Party will approve the use of the Emergency Measures Act this time around, while they were the only party in the House of Commons to vote against the War Measures Act in 1970. Party leader Jagmeet Singh has called the convoy protestors white supremacists, which is par for the course for the left in 2022, but which I find hard to square with Leighton's claim (which I mostly agree with, by the by) that politics has moved from the left-right axis to the centre-periphery axis. In a podcast, Leighton said that the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests were an instance of "the centre granting the periphery license to riot". This idea's been floating in my mind since then. I think that's right, but when and why does this happen? Because it sure didn't happen this time. It seems that just as politics is abandoning the left-right framework, the traditional (and therefore elite) political left is convincing itself that this framework is more important than ever, and that left-coded protests from the periphery are doing the good work of fighting oppression (even though they might be completely aimless) while right-coded protests from the periphery are the expression of white supremacy. I'd like to hear your opinion on this.
All true, but the better question is how does this new form of authoritarianism impact social movement building strategy. I have to admit, the Antifa-types long ago seem to have altered their tacts to fit the reality described above. But the right-wingers still show up to quasi-legal, quasi-revolutionary events with their faces proudly bared.
I guess after tonight’s Darth Vader speech Biden’s minders are getting ready to get our senile POTUS to toggle the switch to “God mode”. As one of the commenters below wrote months ago “this is not a drill”. Great essay! And great writing generally—keep fighting the good fight! Thirty years ago you’d be a star writer for The New Republic or The Atlantic Monthly (not the zombie publications of the same name still lumbering along today).
I am by temperament resistant to authority, but am still left stunned by how little time it took to start building a better genocide.
An ex-Noo Yawkuh, I now live in a very blue community in a mostly libertarian state, and my younger self would have been shocked to find me grateful to have a Republican governor and developing, for the first time in my life, an appreciation for the 2nd Amendment. (Though such attestations should never be necessary, I voted for Obama twice-yes-twice, voted affirmatively for "none of the above" in 2016 and skipped 2020 altogether.)
I chose not to get vaxxed against the current Plague not out of any philosophical, religious (I ain't got no dogma) or political impetus, but for rational reasons--this thing ain't been tested long enough; dissenting scientists have been ruthlessly suppressed, which any normal person would find concerning; I've never gotten a flu shot either and consider this the same category of risk (I got the flu on my 30th birthday, lo these many decades ago, and it was a brutal week but illness gets ya like that sometimes. It's not the Crawling Eye, or something.)
And the reaction to people like me, in letters to the editor in our regional paper (where I was just one of two-count 'em two people to rationally lay out our reasons) would have made Goebbels proud. The paper's circulation encompasses two college towns and by God the intelligentsia have better pitchforks than the peasantry could dream of.
Leighton, you're one of the best essayists on meaningful subjects I've encountered. Live long and prosper.
This is not a drill. This is the real deal, and we acquiesce at our great peril.
I remember considerable emphasis in my formal education on how important it is to resist these sorts of totalitarian movements. I remember watching The Wave, the Stanford Prison Experiment documentary, the Milgram Experiments, etc. I remember reading about how the Nazis were enabled by people who remained quiet. I remember learning the dangers of group think and scapegoating. We learned how important it was to think critically and question authority.
But throughout it all, the threats were coded mostly as right-wing, at least in my Seattle schooling. I don't remember being introduced to, say, Solzhenitsyn. Through the simple trick of putting a leftist mask on totalitarianism and coding resistance as "right wing," "far right," "racist," "white supremacist," etc., almost all of my educated leftist friends and family eagerly abandoned the principles we were raised with and jumped right on the authoritarian bandwagon. It is so crude and obvious a trick, but the intelligentsia are either oblivious or willfully blind to the evil they are perpetuating.
Particularly with the advent of bank account freezing, not to mention the social and career costs of resisting, this adage has a lot of explanatory power these days:
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
― Upton Sinclair, I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked
I'd like to share a recent experience with Yelp. I started noticing that a large number of reviews had been removed, for "violating our terms." Then one of my reviews was removed, for "perpetuating negative cultural stereotypes." I wrote a review of a local Sbarro's where I was unable to order a meal because the server didn't speak English. I asked if someone else working there spoke English but no one did. I thought this was ridiculous so I wrote a negative review. This Sbarro's was in a large local shopping mall in a county that is 70 percent white non-hispanic. I don't think it is possible to shut down the flow of communication entirely, but there seem to be concerted efforts at the major websites and platforms to curate what we can see.
I do agree that recourse to the Emergency Measures Act is an overreach, but on the other hand I don't think Justin Trudeau is a very likely authoritarian leader. Some segments of the Western Canadian right have hated him since he got into politics, and this trucker convoy seems to have been organised by people of this persuasion. And the reason why they hate him really isn't anything to do with him personally, but rather because of their memory of his father. Pierre Trudeau was both much more competent and more authoritarian than Justin (indeed, he was Prime Minister when his government promulgated the War Measures Act during the October Crisis in 1970, which was a much greater authoritarian overreach than what we're seeing now), and in fact it seems to be Justin Trudeau's incompetence that eventually forced him to apply the Emergency Measures Act. In other words, it shouldn't have reached this point if the government had been competent.
What I find interesting is that the left-wing New Democratic Party will approve the use of the Emergency Measures Act this time around, while they were the only party in the House of Commons to vote against the War Measures Act in 1970. Party leader Jagmeet Singh has called the convoy protestors white supremacists, which is par for the course for the left in 2022, but which I find hard to square with Leighton's claim (which I mostly agree with, by the by) that politics has moved from the left-right axis to the centre-periphery axis. In a podcast, Leighton said that the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests were an instance of "the centre granting the periphery license to riot". This idea's been floating in my mind since then. I think that's right, but when and why does this happen? Because it sure didn't happen this time. It seems that just as politics is abandoning the left-right framework, the traditional (and therefore elite) political left is convincing itself that this framework is more important than ever, and that left-coded protests from the periphery are doing the good work of fighting oppression (even though they might be completely aimless) while right-coded protests from the periphery are the expression of white supremacy. I'd like to hear your opinion on this.
Great article Leighton, so well articulated, and what a perfect title.
All true, but the better question is how does this new form of authoritarianism impact social movement building strategy. I have to admit, the Antifa-types long ago seem to have altered their tacts to fit the reality described above. But the right-wingers still show up to quasi-legal, quasi-revolutionary events with their faces proudly bared.
Huxley not Orwell. Welcome to the future…
I guess after tonight’s Darth Vader speech Biden’s minders are getting ready to get our senile POTUS to toggle the switch to “God mode”. As one of the commenters below wrote months ago “this is not a drill”. Great essay! And great writing generally—keep fighting the good fight! Thirty years ago you’d be a star writer for The New Republic or The Atlantic Monthly (not the zombie publications of the same name still lumbering along today).