Clarissa's Soviet Story: "Woke" equals Totalitarianism

Laura

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Clarissa’s Soviet Story

by Avatar Victor
March 1, 2020



I’m in the editing and rewriting stage of Live Not By Lies now, but I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to talk yesterday with a woman I’ll call “Clarissa,” whose stories were so good that I’m weaving them into the book’s narrative. Clarissa is a college professor who emigrated to the US from Russia as a young woman, a few years after the fall of the Soviet Union.


She is yet another ex-Soviet bloc person who is extremely anxious about the emergence of soft totalitarianism here. Of course she can’t use her real name, because she fears professional retaliation. It should tell us something that not a single academic from a former communist country that I interviewed for this book was willing to speak using their own name — this, in the Land of the Free. Why not? Because they were afraid of facing professional consequences for speaking out against identity politics and the “social justice” regime. Below, some quotes from our interview:


I have the feeling of extreme frustration. Our stories of people in the former Soviet space are constantly dismissed. I have no idea why. I think it happens because people still think that the ideas that existed in the Soviet Union are basically good – that it was the execution that was at times excessive. My father says what happened to us was not about the economic system. The economic system was just an excuse. This could happen anywhere – even under capitalism.

Totalitarianism is something that takes away from people the unbearable burden of freedom. It allows many people to hound and persecute with impunity. That is pleasant in many senses. There was a practice in the Soviet Union where people would be told to get together in groups at work and write letters to the newspaper to denounce famous poets or artists. We see that today in Twitter. People love that because it allows a little person to completely destroy somebody who has done something great.
This is very human. Once you have removed any moral or religious obstacles to that behavior, what’s to stop anybody?

When I was nine years old, I had a teacher of Russian literature. I really admired her. What we didn’t know was that her father was a high ranking KGB officer. He found out that a little girl in our class, Masha, was attending church with her parents, and not only that, but was singing in the choir. The teacher one day pulled that little girl out in the class and for an hour unleashed a torrent of abuse on this child. For what? The feeling of power of persecuting that child in front of the rest of us. This is not happening right now in the US, but it’s conceivable.

(On American vulnerability to totalitarianism)
It’s American exceptionalism. You all think you’re such special people that you’re going to do it right. If socialism comes here, don’t worry, we’ll make it happen in the correct way. Not true! Ten years ago if you had told me I would be seeing this in the US, I would have laughed in your face. But now it’s happening. I’m seeing it happening to my friends. It’s like their minds are disintegrating.

Once your religion is taken away, you still have a need for an overarching moral law. You’re going to look for it somewhere else, even outside religion. We’re seeing it now with this identity politics. … In the Soviet Union when I was young, cynicism was everywhere. Nobody believed in anything. Everybody just went through the motions. I used to think that cynicism was the worst thing in the world. It’s not. The worst thing in the world is the lack of cynicism and critical difference, and accepting everything uncritically. These people today, they really believe all this woke ideology. And that’s what’s really scary
I have a friend who is very woke. The woke ideology is the belief is that if somebody departs from the dogma, even by an inch, that person is an evil, hate-filled bigot. When I disagree with her, I can see that she genuinely can’t comprehend that I disagree with her. She knows I’m a good person, but here I am disagreeing with her. She can’t understand it. And she’s an educated person! A college professor.
The intellectuals are playing a dangerous game. They think they can control it. They think that once their ideas are imposed on society, they can control it. That’s ludicrous. They’re going to be the first ones the system turns on, because as intellectuals, they can be the first ones to spot the flaws in the system.
Nobody is going to be safe. Nobody can pledge enough allegiance to this kind of system to protect themselves.

I mentor early career academics. I used to enjoy it, but not anymore. These graduate students are not producing scholarship. They’re just turning in collections of woke slogans. I don’t even know what to do with that. When we start talking to the younger academics, they don’t understand what we want for them. They were taught this way, and they’re reproducing it. I see this from students who come to college. It seems like all they get in the schools is dogma. They are blank slates. They have no real knowledge of anything – they just repeat slogans, and when you ask them to explain it, they turn blank.
In the Soviet Union, when you were a student and assigned to write a paper, you knew that the thing to do was to go straight to the correct books in the library and copy the relevant articles, word for word, with no deviations. That was your paper. When my family left, we arrived in Canada, and I entered the university there. When I was assigned my first paper, I found it impossible to believe that the teacher really did want me to think for myself. It was an incredible feeling! To think about something, and to say what I really thought about it! It was so weird, but so liberating.
Now, I’m seeing young people who are just like we were in the Soviet Union. They are afraid to think for themselves. They only want to know what the “right” answer is, and repeat it. It’s depressing.

The problem is that many people still associate totalitarianism with an all-powerful state, and if it doesn’t come from the state, it’s not totalitarianism. What we’re dealing with now is not coming from the state. None of us are afraid that the government is going to send secret police and take us to the dungeon. That’s not going to happen. No. We’re afraid of being humiliated and deprived of a living. Of being a pariah, of being marginalized, unpersonned, cancelled. You don’t need the government for that, especially in the age of social media. It wasn’t the government hounding those Covington Catholic boys, or J.K. Rowling.
Voting for someone [as a protest against political correctness] is wonderful, but the government cannot solve this problem.

Since I started going to church a couple of years ago, I began to understand what was taken from us. I feel incredibly angry that we were deprived of something that’s such a huge part of our culture and civilization, that it taken from us. I take my little girl to church and Sunday school. I want my child to know this so she doesn’t have to discover it in her forties, and feel clumsy.

I wish we had some form of a secret handshake [on my campus]. I know a couple of other professors on campus who I suspect are one of us. But everybody is so closeted, it’s impossible to talk about it.
We have this bias response team that prowls the campus looking for signs of non-compliance, and to justify their existence. We had the same thing in the Soviet Union. Right now they’re on campus, but eventually, they’re going to be in every workplace. If you have everybody in your workplace trained in diversity, then you can treat your workers however you like, and nobody will care.

(On the culture created by diversity and sensitivity training in the workplace)
All your co-workers are enemies. Either they can get you in trouble, or they are out to destroy you with an accusation. It destroys all sorts of uncontrollable communities – friendship, families, church communities. When you set people against each other, they are much easier to control. This is what it was like under totalitarianism.

I hope in this book you can convey a sense of urgency. If you think you can hide from this, and not have to confront it, you’re dreaming. This is coming for everybody. This is coming soon, and people have to think about it now. If you know how you’re going to respond when the persecution comes, you will be in a better position to react to it.

There will be more in Live Not By Lies, out in early September. By the way, I’m going to be traveling today to a weekend wedding, so comments approval is going to be delayed.


By the way, here is a link to Clarissa’s blog, if you’re interested. Here’s a post from a previous blog of hers, about her father’s life as a closeted Christian in the USSR.
 
Clarissa’s Soviet Story

Snip

We have this bias response team that prowls the campus looking for signs of non-compliance, and to justify their existence. We had the same thing in the Soviet Union. Right now they’re on campus, but eventually, they’re going to be in every workplace. If you have everybody in your workplace trained in diversity, then you can treat your workers however you like, and nobody will care.

(On the culture created by diversity and sensitivity training in the workplace)

All your co-workers are enemies. Either they can get you in trouble, or they are out to destroy you with an accusation. It destroys all sorts of uncontrollable communities – friendship, families, church communities. When you set people against each other, they are much easier to control. This is what it was like under totalitarianism.

"..they're going to be in every workplace," and oh brother and sister is that not happening. When looking back over the last 5 years along, it has become staggering in seeing the incremental movement from point A to point B. No longer does HR hire on the basis of skill - it's now soft social academic skills with the ability to parrot from a new diversity song sheet. It has everyone looking over their shoulders in their work environments that have become micro-social distractions of watching your P's and Q's; not P's, as in politeness, no, in every which way one interacts - verbally or by written word. It's becoming a toxic PC minefield.

Hence:

"...they are much easier to control."

Wow, that's powerful and scary and exactly the sort of thing Peterson was standing up against that rocketed him into notoriety and controversy.

Yes, indeed it did just that to JP "into notoriety and controversy," and to outright mass hysteria and ostracism by many of his peers, along with boldface lies by the media to round it off.
 
An interesting draft take on woke as religion:

an original sin as the cause of present-day evils (e.g., slavery, the industrial revolution, etc).
guilty devils (e.g., white people, “climate deniers,” etc.)
sacred victims (e.g., black people, poor islanders, etc.)
“The Elect,” or people self-appointed to crusade against evil (e.g., BLM activists, Greta Thunberg, etc.).
a set of taboos (e.g., saying “All lives matter,” criticizing renewables, etc.)
purifying rituals (e.g., kneeling/apologizing, buying carbon offsets, etc).

1.2..jpeg
 
Indeed. I am a former product of the Romanian Communist Party ideology. To speak different than ‘woke’ on FB is like speaking as a member of the Party against the Party in a Party meeting. The ‘woke’ is not a religion, it is a political movement designed to coerce the educated majority through such outrageously dissonant notions that can only be equated to psychological abuse and violence. To borrow a computer term, It is an attempt to low level format of the sociopolitical space devoid of free conversation as fear of snitches lurking around the water cooler prevails.

It is bad because it is force fed in the tertiary education creating woke experts of woke and antiwoke experts of woke, thmselves equally, if not more becoming to be ardent woke activists. Like any good activist from the communist era, that did the communist party school about communist ideology.
So, fear ... after the meeting where you whisteled in the church, besides the fact that you have to do your self criticism in writing so it can be put in your dossier, you will forever be on the list of voluntary work, you will be forever last on the housing list, you will never get promoted, and if you speak about something touchy you might get to see the inside of various party secretaries offices in disciplinary meetings and get demoted to cleaning duties, or get expelled or fired...Hwo would not be afraid that would affect your entire family’s life, in a society planned and programmed from craddle to grave.

Is is likely to happen in America? Perhaps, but only after a totally devastating war, devastation similar to the eastern block countries after the second world war. How likely is THAT to happen?
 
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