I haven’t even read the classics 1984 or Animal Farm. I’m also interested in anything about the rise of Bolshevism to better understand the enemy.
Suggestions welcome.
Thanks.
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I haven’t even read the classics 1984 or Animal Farm. I’m also interested in anything about the rise of Bolshevism to better understand the enemy.
Suggestions welcome.
Thanks.
Orwell was a socialist. He believed "true" socialism had been betrayed, and spent his life attacking the traitors (Stalin, Islington liberals etc). His book are about the "corruption" of the ideal.
If you haven't read the classics, then the best thing to do is do the metacognition: read around the subjects to get a feel for what to study. "Cynical Theories" and "Intellectual Imposters" are great first-reads.
For Bolshevism (Leninism) and Maoism (Marxist-Leninism), you have to look at Marx. For Marx, you have to look at Hegel. If Marx is the antichrist,. Hegel is Satan: all of it comes from him.
After you've looked at Marx, ask yourself if there were ideas other than his. There were. Look at the Austrian school (Pareto) and statistics.
Then look at Karl Popper and Bertrand Russell.
Put together Freud and Marx, and you have Critical Theory and Marcuse. Put Critical Theory into universities with dropout students, and you have "sociology" degrees. Add those students together and they pursue a "critical consciousness" (seeing society like a Marxist). Take away the church using atheism, and you have a new secular humanist religion they have transferred their instincts onto, one they are "born again" into, aka Woke (enlightened to their new critical theory Marxist consciousness).
Wokies believe they attained a new spiritual condition by seeing things (race, sex, gender etc) in a Marxist way, revealing a hidden set of systems and structures causing the world's injustices - which they must fix as a source of their purpose and meaning. Theirs is a revealed truth only they have learned to see. By.... seeing it in a Marxist way.
That all comes from Hegel.
Take out Hegel, Rousseau, Marx, and Freud, and it's all gone. There is no unconscious mind, so there goes "unconscious (invisible) bias training".
it goes like this:
One warning: be careful when it comes to Bolshevism. Most of "Mein Kampf" rails against it, so when you're discussing the subject with Very Smart People owning lame philosophy degrees, they will call you a Nazi.
https://www.amazon.com/Freedom-Its-Betrayal-Enemies-Liberty/dp/069115757X
Read your bible! There is not a single word which is subjective or relative. Christ claimed to be the objective and absolute truth, not as a thing, but as a person. It will read you.
Thanks for the suggestions. I have read some of Mein Kampf, but never finished it. It's a long book. It's terrible that people call you a Nazi just for wanting to learn about history from the source. The weird thing is that the book, so far, wasn't the hateful ranting I was told that it was.
It has historical value. This modern New Left of adult children see even its existence as a threat, and all words in general as violence. Most of it is obnoxious nonsense and the author's victimhood ("My struggle"), but it's crucial to understand the origins of WWII (embarrassment over the Treaty of Versailles etc). Just as it's crucial to read Lenin's "What is to be done?" and Marx's rants from Paris.
Fundamentalists are literal thinkers, who believe everyone else also thinks literally as if they are reading scripture. Says more about them than it does everyone else.
It’s interesting to see why people have thought certain things. They teach you as a kid that Hitler just randomly decided to round up the Jews one day. But there is a lot leading up to it. In fact, in his own words he was against antisemitism and it was a movement in Germany well before he rose to power. Obviously he changed his views, and the book explains his thought process on why, but it’s very interesting to hear these things from the source.
It's strange to me how so much of this is missing from the US/Canada curriculums, as well as basic civics. In Quebec, for example, their history classes last two years and focus on the last 150 years up to the origin of fur trading. The roots are so, so much deeper than that. Your heritage tells you who you are.
Hitler was a strange, complex character: it was Germany's third act of imperialism aggression. As were Stalin, Mao, Lenin, Mussolini, and even Churchill. We forget there were entire political groupthink systems of the day and it wasn't just some strawman avatar. Not to mention the role of Bolshevism, fascism in England and Spain, the role of Mexico, the collapse of Liberia, communism in Southern Africa, and so on.
My most frequent comment to American buds is my total bewilderment at them not being able to recognise what this woke/BLM/big tech thing is. It's very, very old, and most Eastern European residents know exactly what they're seeing.