Books didn't make Stalin a nicer person. Credit: Universal History Archive/Getty Images
Once a book-hoarder, always one. In 1899, a promising young poet and would-be revolutionary dropped out of the theological seminary in Tbilisi, Georgia. He took with him 18 library books, for which the monks demanded payment of 18 roubles and 15 kopeks. When, 54 years later, the same voracious bookworm died, he had 72 unreturned volumes from the Lenin Library in Moscow on his packed shelves. At the time, the librarians probably had too many other issues with Josef Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, aka Stalin, to worry about collecting his unpaid fines.
Those squirrelled library loans formed a tiny part of a vast collection amassed by the Soviet dictator, estimated by historian Geoffrey Roberts at 25,000 items. Joseph Stalin’s books, as Roberts recounts in his new study Stalin’s Library, belonged to “a serious intellectual who valued ideas as much as power”. He spent a lifetime as a “highly active, engaged and methodical reader”. His tastes and interests spanned not only politics, economics and history but literature of many kinds. The book-loving shoemaker’s son from Georgia grew into an absolute ruler who deployed his library not as a prestige adornment but a “working archive”. Its bulging shelves stretched across his Kremlin offices and quarters, and around his dachas outside central Moscow.
Stalin not only read, quickly and hungrily: he claimed to devour 500 pages each day and, in the Twenties, ordered 500 new titles every year — not to mention the piles of works submitted to him by hopeful or fearful authors. He annotated with passion and vigour. Hundreds of volumes crawl with his distinctive markings and marginalia (the so-called pometki), their pages festooned with emphatic interjections: “ha ha”, “gibberish”, “rubbish”, “fool”, “scumbag”; and, more rarely, “agreed”, “spot on”, or the noncommittal doubt conveyed by the Russian “m-da”.
Stalin also drafted, wrote, and re-wrote, keenly and tirelessly — everything from Communist Party propaganda to Soviet legal edicts and textbooks in history, Marxist-Leninist philosophy and economics. He loved to edit and, as Roberts shows, he did it very well, slicing through the verbiage of sycophants to achieve greater “clarity and accuracy”. Although not an original thinker, “his intellectual hallmark was that of a brilliant simplifier, clarifier and populariser”. Robert Service, in his biography, calls the dictator “an accumulator and regurgitator” of ideas. Stalin never returned to the verse of his adolescence, but the young poet known as “Soselo” had won anthology places for the fragile tenderness of Georgian lyrics such as “To the Moon” (translation by Donald Rayfield):
Know for certain that once
Struck down to the ground, an oppressed man
Strives again to reach the pure mountain,
When exalted by hope.
So, lovely moon, as before
Glimmer through the clouds;
Pleasantly in the azure vault
Make your beams play.
Later, as a vigilant, hands-on editor, Stalin knew how to cut the theoretical waffle, keep things concrete and tell a striking story. In mass-circulation works such as the Short Course History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, with its 36 million copies printed in the decade after 1938, he especially liked to strike out “laudatory accounts of his own role”. He insisted that cloying hero-worship made his stomach turn. “What are people supposed to do?” Stalin asked sarcastically as he toned down the official Short Biography of himself published in 1946. “Get down on their knees and pray to me?” No court jester dared answer: “Yes”.
Of all the mind-scrambling glimpses of the despot as an “emotionally intelligent and feeling intellectual” gathered in Stalin’s Library, none quite matches the record of a Central Committee meeting, held in September 1940, about the limits of artistic expression. The General Secretary spoke up firmly on the side of freedom. “You have to let people express themselves,” Comrade Stalin argued. Artists should avoid fairy-tales that toe the party line.
Take the wonderful Chekhov, who “has no heroes but rather grey people”. Stalin approves. Even the enemies of the Soviet Union should not be depicted as monsters “lacking all human traits”. Even Trotsky — here you imagine stifled intakes of breath around a smoky Kremlin chamber — was a “capable person” who must be shown with all his “positive qualities”. Was a capable person: just a couple of weeks earlier, Ramón Mercader had, on Stalin’s orders, buried an ice-axe in Trotsky’s skull in Mexico City. Thus putting a definitive end to his character development, positive or negative.
How many other people did Stalin kill? If Cold War-era historians such as Robert Conquest laid 15-20 million deaths at his door (in The Great Terror), post-Soviet research has led scholars such as Timothy Snyder to suggest a revised estimate of between six and nine million (Bloodlands). Even the lowest figure freezes the imagination. For almost a century, allies, enemies, victims and a wondering posterity have struggled to understand how this gigantic annihilation of life and hope emerged from the ideas and deeds not of a “psychopath” — Roberts rightly rejects the term — but a shrewd, calm, widely-read and thoughtful politician-manager who had learned both to “rationalise and abstract himself from his terrible rule”. Trotsky lies dead in a Mexican morgue. A shame: such a smart guy…
Stalin, then, presents a challenge to anyone who claims a specific link between deep reading and the pursuit of ethical or social virtue. Learning nurtures wisdom in many ancient traditions. But the years since the millennium have seen a small explosion in research that tries to prove a non-trivial link between consistent reading and the empathy that allows us to inhabit other souls and walk a verst (or many) in their shoes. If literature doesn’t exactly make you better, runs the refrain of many experimental papers in psychology and neuroscience, then regular exposure to it — especially fiction — will enhance those social skills that demand an understanding of the world perceived through other eyes.
“Specifically, engaging with narrative fiction and mentally simulating the social experiences represented may improve or maintain social skills, especially skills of empathy and social understanding,” reports one widely-cited Canadian paper from 2009, referenced in the back-up materials for World Book Day (celebrated on 3 March). Toronto novelist-psychologist Keith Oatley, one of its authors, has emerged as a leading champion of reading as an empathy shot. (Interestingly, his University of Toronto co-researchers on that paper included Jordan B Peterson, later to find wider fame elsewhere.)
A survey of the evidence from 2016 affirms that “Readers of fiction score higher on measures of empathy and theory of mind (ToM) — the ability to think about others’ thoughts and feelings — than non-readers, even after controlling for age, gender, intelligence and personality factors”. The World Book Day outreach projects aim to put books into non-readers’ hands, on the basis that “Reading for pleasure is the single biggest indicator of a child’s future success — more than their family circumstances, their parents’ educational background or their income.” Here, empathy as social asset takes a back seat as voluntary reading becomes a sort of educational superpower.
Stalin, by the way, did read plenty of fiction, drama, poetry and narrative history in addition to political and economic analysis. He loved the novels of Émile Zola, made writer Maxim Gorky the most fêted private citizen in the USSR, and ran the Stalin Prizes for creative writing from his own office. Dmitry Shepilov, Pravda editor and court intellectual, later wrote that Stalin “was probably better prepared for the meetings than anyone else”. Sinister tales abound of his creepily close-focus attention to the literary arts in Soviet Russia.
One of the best known, not mentioned in Roberts’s book, concerns the arrest and persecution of the poet Osip Mandelstam. In 1934, Stalin phoned the detained poet’s friend, Boris Pasternak. “Mandelstam’s case is being analysed”, Stalin reassures Pasternak:
“Everything will be worked out. Why haven’t the writers’ organisations come to me? If I were a poet and my friend had fallen into disgrace, I would climb the walls to help him.”
Then Stalin dons his critic’s hat to ask “But is he or is he not a master?” Pasternak replies “That’s not the point!”, and requests a meeting. But Stalin hangs up. In the event, the Kremlin Mountaineer — the title of Mandelstam’s famous anti-Stalin satire — did not exactly murder the poet. Exile, jail and illness killed Mandelstam in 1938. It was not quite an execution; not an exoneration either. More a lethal “m-da”.
Although it lies beyond the author’s remit, Stalin’s Library tests to destruction the consoling notion that long, wide, extensive reading confers the gift of empathy — or rather, that empathy is a value to cherish. Roberts, though, maintains that whatever vital sparks of humanity the Soviet autocrat lacked, the ability to conceive the independent life of other minds was not among them. Indeed, he credits Stalin with “too much human empathy” as the grand paranoiac envisaged the hearts of his rivals seething with non-existent plots and stratagems to oust him. What the ultimate scholar-slayer missed was any shred of the “compassion or sympathy” that might stay his hand before he sent the bodies of those minds to a slow, cold fate in the Gulag or a quicker end in the basement of the Lubyanka.
In his reading, Stalin preferred strong characters — real or fictional — with firmly-marked personality and agency, not blurred ciphers of a class or an epoch. “Peter was Peter, Catherine was Catherine,” he proclaimed about the great Tsars in the course of a critique of the over-theoretical Soviet textbooks of the 1930s, “They rested on certain classes … but they acted, they were historical figures”. Stalin may never actually have said anything like “A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths are a statistic” (though the German satirist Kurt Tucholsky did). But the apocryphal wisecrack at least captures an empathetic reader’s ability to feel the weight of individual lives and minds.
Stalin did not lack empathy, then, for writers or their work. He grasped too — as censorious heresy-hunters still do not — that books acquire meaning and value separate from their creators’ beliefs. Defending the genius of the “reactionary” Nicolai Gogol, he urged that “the world views of writers should not be confused with the impact of their works on readers”. Nothing in Stalin’s long, complex and sometimes subtle engagement with culture disproves the advocates of intensive reading as a highway to empathy. The flaw, rather, lies in treating that quality as a firm proxy for interpersonal goodwill.
However robust and reliable on its own terms, research on the reading-empathy connection comes out of a cognitive science that finds it hard to define and describe a social world far beyond its probings of the story-stimulated mind. The 2016 paper I cited on “Reading fiction and reading minds” leaps from a scrutiny of the brain’s “default network”, and its activation by reading, to the assertion that: “Historically, highly literate societies, especially societies that produced psychologically rich literature, function more empathically and less violently than less literate societies.”
Show me a society with a greater “psychologically rich literature” than Russia. Now show me one that, in modern times, has brutalised its own people and its neighbours with more savagery. China, perhaps, or Germany? Both are also powerhouses of “psychologically rich literature”. Without the norms, laws and institutions to scale up private understanding into public civility, the solitary reader’s empathy will be, at best, an advantageous knack. After all, every low-grade swindler, conman and fraudster depends on a serviceable theory of other minds and how they work. And, if your milieu and your ideology impose no veto on mass persecution and state murder, the ability to mess with your victims’ heads simply adds another weapon to the oppressor’s armoury.
Perhaps the empathy that books deepen can only do collective good if a community — whether a household or a nation — decides to reward the sort of fellow-feeling that brings help and not harm to others. Whereas in the moral wasteland of Stalin’s Russia, the insight into other minds conferred by some of these 25,000 volumes served as just another manipulative tool of domination. Reading alone, could not make Stalin less Stalinist. If anything, his lifelong bookworm’s habits seem to have turned him — to quote his own formula for the writer’s role — into a more cunning and devious “engineer of human souls”.
Boyd Tonkin is a journalist, editor, and literary and music critic, and author recently of The 100 Best Novels in Translation.
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SubscribeThere was a mass shooting on the New York subway recently – a black man in a gas mask. Initial reports seem to suggest a racial motive but the story seemed to disappear from the MSM quite quickly.
As Ayaan points out, the US seems to be full of violent nut jobs. Colour isn’t the defining issue to anybody but the Democrats.
And every weekend in Chicago, several black young men are killed by their own in the drug wars. Sometimes, more than 10. They report the tally every Monday on the evening news. Yawns result.
Apparently, THOSE black lives don’t matter to all those leftists.
So this little equation illustrates a very peculiar social dysphoria. An organization calling itself Black Lives Matter lobbies relentlessly for the defunding of police departments, and continuously circulates anti-police rhetoric and propaganda, which causes police activity in Black communities to retract, recede and retreat. In turn, this creates a significant upturn in Black-on-Black violence, including homicide rates of drastic proportion. One may wish to point this out and ask the obvious question: Do not these Black lives matter, too? Or are they devoid of the same political expediency and usefulness as one very singular and specific Black life? And if this is the case, then does not the obvious disparity between the two categories shoot full of holes (pardon the grammatical tool) the entire status and dignity of the argument? Because it strongly suggests that only some Black lives matter. Others, not so much, if at all. To strip it down to the bare bones, it matters just who is the killer. And that, too often, is all.
I am well aware that this particular argument has been made countless times, by persons much further up the food chain than myself, by Black intellectuals and scholars themselves, and by many more distinguished and knowledgeable people whose oversight and understanding leaves no doubt about their integrity and perception.
And yet, it is business as usual. While many thousands of people die each year. While some people claim this is all due to white supremacy, white adjacency, whiteness, and some dark force under every rock and leaf and behind every bush. Because maybe the actual truth is just too awful to own up to, not by the people actually committing the murders, but by the people trying to get a handle on the thing and figure it out. But those lives – of people gunned down by their own, decidedly do not matter. And I see no outrage over this. In every single camp set up and designed to be properly outraged by the slightest micro aggression coming from the wrong skin-colored person. And it stinks of hypocrisy. The sweet smell of simple irony faded long ago.
His stated objective was to get revenge for the Wakuesha parade attack. Do notice how Biden essentially ignored that one and its white victims and compare that to him turning up in person to Buffalo to milk the deaths of black people for political gain.
” We expressed horror that while blacks make up only 12% of the population, they account for 55% of homicide cases. ”
More importantly, collectively, as an American society, we’re afraid to explore and discuss the fact that 80-90% of the homicide cases perpetrated against black Americans are by BLACK MEN. Why the societal taboo of analyzing this statistical fact? Why are we so quick to elevate the concept of white racist attacks on a black minority, when in fact that statistic is minor relative to black-on-black crime? Why ignore that fact that the majority of antisemitic attacks against ultra-orthodox Jews in contemporary New York are perpetrated by black men…or the fact that the Asian-American community is also experiencing a disproportionate level of assaults by black men?
New York City has a black Mayor, a black Chief of Police, a black District Attorney, and a black Attorney General…and the crime rate, especially black-on-black crime, is at a generational high. Can systemic racism be blamed for this, especially if the system is lead by black persons in power?
Because black people are not killing black people because they’re black, just for very mundane reasons like power within their communities or control of illegal activities (not forgetting the usual suspect of domestic violence). I’m not saying that this is ok, or should not be high-lighted, but these muders are of a different kind from the Buffalo murders.
I’m really not sure why! The victims are just as dead and the families presumably grieve just as much. Then of course is the fact that the rather important consideration that the ‘non-racist’ killings vastly outnumber the racist ones.
In fact there is a rather a myth of a homogenous and often victimised black community, when actually there is all sorts of contempt and hostility between groups WITHIN it.
My experience is that people with money and power rarely care about the poor and powerless. This is rather independent of skin color.
Let me rephrase your sentence. …”liberal democrats with money and power need black victims to survive….”
Joseph, I can’t refute your personal experiences in this area but I don’t share your conclusion here. I think people in general DO care about the poor and powerless, or rather the poor and unfortunate. The difficulty lies in solutions. It’s difficult to solve the issues that plague the poor because we live in a free society where the best and most visible resources are acquired by the smartest and most industrious. Those who lag behind tend to stay behind. Helping the unfortunate, for me anyway, often boils down to a personal project because I do encounter unfortunate people along the way. What I often have to donate is not money, but time and know-how. Racism is an individual problem, not systemic. The solution is also to act on the individual level, rather than sweeping solutions.
“Caring” does nothing. All the good intentions in the world do not make a bad policy good. And there are rarely “solutions” to problems involving human beings, there are only trade-offs. If you want more of this it will be at the cost of less of that. Unintended consequences almost always make things worse.
There are so many programs a poor person can avail themselves of, the problem is not what can’t they do, but how can they be motivated to do it?
Apprenticeship? College Degree?
You make your choices and you reap the results.
At tfe very darkest points, the military has always been a means of getting employment.
Then there is Civil Service.
And these things have been there all along, across decades.
What on earth can one expect from a society where a Black Police Lieutenant deliberately shoots and kills a White woman and gets away with it, whilst a White Policeman inadvertently kills a known Black criminal during an arrest and is condemned without hesitation?
What would the ‘Founding Fathers’ say about that I wonder?
Ashley Babbitt, RIP.
Also, a white man called Tony Timpa was killed exactly the same way as Floyd, except that he wasn’t a criminal, called 911 himself, wasn’t resisting arrest, and the police responsible were cracking jokes.
Of course, the police were let off scot free, and the “anti-racists” couldnt care less, because for them skin colour is all that matters. What a world.
And then you have Edward Bronstein. Nobody’s heard of him. Of course.
Just one individual from that cohort of “certain individuals” seems to pop up every now and then to sow much wider fear as a result of the murder and mayhem he causes to society in a certain location, at a certain time. Every now and then, which, in a country as large as the United States, where freedom runs three thousand miles from west to east, suggests that in each state such atrocities are extremely rare. And I imagine that that fear, far-ranging in the modern age, deepest in the communities that feel as much targeted as the actual similar community directly affected by the evil act, is in part a fear of a cycle of revenge being instantly initiated. Thankfully, even in a huge country like America, copycat attacks or acts of revenge don’t seem to occur at atrocity-level. The certain individuals who are the perpetrators of such atrocities appear just that: lone, unconnected individuals. America is not like the old view of the Balkans in which a land is riven by sectarian or racial hatred where all its takes is a spark. The fact that the alleged attacker had also set out to live-stream his murderous actions suggests a desperate desire to stoke a response in terms of either a race war or copycat attacks on black communities. But no amount of such desperation on an attacker’s part has, to my knowledge, succeeded in sparking a mini-conflict between black and white on America’s streets. That in my mind tells me Americans have a lot more sense than they are given credit for, even by their own politicians. The sooner Americans realise how much their essential kind and generous outlooks reflect well on themselves, the sooner the deep fear and despair associated with a news event dissipates. The violent and vexed events of the summer of 2020 have laid bare for Americans the idiocy of pandering to those who would tell Americans of all stripes that their fears are well grounded, that they are alone and adrift in a world that does not care for them, that despises them, that is leaving them behind. And there you have it: there are certain Americans whose aim is to make Americans essentially miserable. Not just miserable with guilt, but miserable with fears about the future, as well as miserable with the mantle of victimhood. That is anti-civilisational. And some politicians should know better. After all, some of them had undoubtedly happy childhoods way back, when traditional American values were more the thing. And they are supposedly interested in keeping the flame of democracy as much as freedom alive. Yet there are even members of government who pander to the media and to gurus who claim to know the make-up of all Americans. The young are not immune to their consultations. They live in the moment, and they’re not aware of what they are going through. It’s time government led responsibly instead of being reactionary. With freedom comes great responsibility.
Amen! Well stated.
There is a huge problem in the way such incidents are discussed.
Depending entirely on which (ethnic / religious / gender) group that individual is from, they are invariably framed as either
a) indicative of how everyone from that group is a racist, sexist bigot and how society suffers from structural something thanks to that group
b) Just some random incident thanks to “mental illness”, not every XYZ group is like that, and you are a bigot for expressing concerns
Thus, white male attacker – a group that died in large numbers to end fascism and slavery, whose countries are the most tolerant and allow equal opportunity – then such incidents prove structural racism, and how toxic the group is.
If you belong to certain “minority” groups which actually were more involved in slavery and never outlawed it, committed awful genocides, etc and are much more likely to say commit terror attacks or launch unprovoked attacks on elderly Asians in NY?
You are protected. I still remember how was in a cab, after yet another terror attack in UK, and the news on radio started talking about how the attacker had “mental illness” and refused to share his ethnic identity. And the cabbie and me (neither of us white incidentally) looked at each other and burst out laughing.
“Blacks have done nothing on their own to effect change besides protesting.”
I can’t let that pass. The great majority of black people are minding their own business and getting on with their lives and trying to make their own small corners of society better. There are numerous black leaders that bemoan the terrible rantings of Kendi, Harris, and so many others. But they are invisible to the MSM.
However, I wonder why blacks vote in large majorities for the very party that denigrates them with affirmative action and other condescending attitudes and programs.
I think that comment is unnecessarily provocative. What do you mean by ‘blacks have done nothing’? That they are a minority? Martin Luther King and his followers hardly ‘did nothing’ in American society and in fact neither in his different way did Malcolm X. And there are protests and protests, as we can see from the huge moral difference between MLK’s Washington rally and mass rioting and arson in 2022.
On your definition, perhaps few people of any race actually ‘do anything’ because they are politically passive.
stop letting the truth get in the way of a comfortable narrative.
Facts are facts – but the emotions trump facts in our postmodern world (or so they say).
If I were much younger and starting up a business (and indifferent to ethics) I think I’d go into suppling pitchforks, inflammable torches, and loud hailers.
Interesting in a U.K. context that Islamic terrorists are seen as not to represent the entire community of Muslims. I agree but quite a lot of Islamic clerical leaders and immigrants are pretty ambivalent. Obviously though any crime perpetrated by a loser who happens to be white is white genocide.
I have noticed this intellectual inconsistency with regard to biased conclusions. Even in the context of Bill Warner’s analysis of Political Islam, which I find hard to argue with, Muslims find acceptance and sympathy when in actuality their ideology is quite threatening to democracy. Makes no sense.
I am 66 and white and have noticed the creeping demonization of whites over the past few years and find it very distressing. My children, in their 20s and 30s are only now realizing how their Progressive silence has been complicit in sealing this notion.
Something happened in our educational systems since the 1970s to destroy the appreciation for Western Civilization. This must be rebuilt.
“In his speech afterwards, Shelbey Steele, the author of White Guilt, summarised the implications of this reality: despite the fact that some racism does still persist, America remains the best country in the world to be black. We all applauded when he said that. It should not have been a sensational remark. And yet it was.”
I would have liked to see this proposition expanded on. I presume that for the author the fact that in black majority countries billionaires exist does not compensate for the comparative lack of institutional structures that promote order and wealth creation that ensure that the average US black is better off than in black majority countries or even white majority countries like the UK that don’t have the same history of institutional apartheid that existed in large swathes of the US until comparatively recent times. However, it is a proposition that deserved a more detailed exposition.
Nothing detracts, of course, from the basic message she advances that blacks are not helped by white guilt rhetoric.
The colour of a man’s skin is and should be of no more importance than the colour of his hair, eyes or any other external factor. The division of man into different racial categories is no more than 18th Century junk science.
It is a statistically recorded fact that the life prospects of those who are comparatively tall or comparatively good looking are better than those of the short and ugly despite obvious exceptions. However, we don’t give preferential treatment in University entrance to the short and ugly or obsess over the comparative lack of short and ugly people in desirable jobs and TV advertising. Nor, despite the undoubted prejudice with which blacks have been viewed particularly in the US in the past, should we do the so for those whose skin is comparatively dark.
Medical statistics confirm that there are different groups of humans. If it is now passe to claim that races don’t exist, so be it, but that doesn’t change reality.
“Thrown into a frenzy by their overzealous conviction that white racism is the root cause of all evil, BLM turned a blind eye to the large number of black Americans…”
Far too generous. It should say “Thrown into a frenzy by the opportunity to grift”
I know what you mean, but I don’t think BLM could have developed into what is essentially a quasi-religion simply on the basis of cynicism. It must have many true believers. Of course, as in the past with some white pastors, the temptation to embezzle funds is too great, especially since guilt-tripping white people, inchoate ‘anti-capitalism’ and various riots represents pretty much their entire project. BLM has absolutely no proper governance nor any considered programme of using the millions of dollars raised for any clearly defined purpose, which on balance is probably just as well!
Most of US media works for the Democrat party. It bullies white people into voting against their own best interests while trying to lock on to black voters by terrorising them with stories of systemic racism. While the violent individuals involved in these heinous attacks should be held completely accountable for their crimes, the complicity of US news media also needs to be examined.
Brilliant article.
Thank you Ayyan for another brilliant commentary. The absolute rejection of systemic racism is codified in the US Constitution and American law in general. Racism is an individual problem that can be diminished with the application of the legal system, but can only be eliminated completely on a personal level.
The conclusions of binary thinking are indeed the primary source of this wrongheaded notion of systemic racism. Political dishonesty on the Left is also guilty. The only cure will be for public intellectuals like yourselves to keep speaking out. There are places of common ground where a majority can sit and discuss these problems – like Jordan Peterson’s analysis of In-Groups and Out-Groups. My 4 grown children missed Western Civilization in the politically corrupted halls of my alma mater, the University of Texas at Austin. They had a different kind of education there than I did, thanks to a corruption by Critical Theory and Progressive politics in substituting for much of the Western Canon. Let’s hope the radical humanitarian philosophies of the 17th and 18th century Europe, which set men free, along with an appreciation of Judeo Christian tradition will return soon in full force.
The disparity in black/ white educational results is in great part due to the disproportionately large number of blacks that come from inner city schools and the total control over their k-12 education by teachers’ unions, i.e. the Democrats’ most reliable foot soldiers. Dems, if you want to blame somebody for the poor educational results achieved by blacks, start by looking in the mirror.
I think, the old adage, ‘Careful what you wish for’ is something that is often forgotten by ‘stupid’ people.
Yes, absolutely. 100% agree…and yet…
Ms. Ali tells us, “None of which is to say that America is any sort of utopia for black Americans.” She’s right. It isn’t. But neither is it a utopia for white Americans….or brown Americans….or whatever color American you choose to name. It’s not a utopia for straights or gays or any of the other 31 Flavors. It’s not a utopia for men or women, not even for those pretending to be men or women. As a matter of fact, America is NOT and never will be a Utopia at all, ever, for anyone. It’s not intended or designed to be Utopian. Nor can any human-made-thing ever be expected to exhibit such inhuman perfection.
But this unworldly Utopia, indeed, is what the Left pursues: a secular heaven on earth where everyone is equal, everyone is included, everything is diverse, and all outcomes socially just. Just ‘Imagine’ as the Other Lennon put it:
“Imagine there’s no countries….Nothing to kill or die for…And no religion, too….Imagine all the people….Livin’ life in peace … Imagine no possessions…. No need for greed or hunger…A brotherhood of man”
So no, short of asinine song lyrics which evoke nothing but a soul-deadening ‘Brave New World’ sameness, the world is not and will never be assembled, shaped, or formed to make anyone’s life fuzzy, warm, and exceedingly perfect. Life is hard for everyone.
Ms. Ali asks, “How can we view such an atrocity and not let it overwhelm our judgement? How can we not conclude that such evil merits nothing sort of societal change?” The answer is simple, cold, and bluntly cruel: the same way we view every atrocity. History is filled with them. Man’s inhumanity to man is made manifest in every age and on every conceivable scale. NBC’s Dateline tracks and showcases a new particularized evil every week. Ted Bundy slaughtered 30+ young women all across the country; that was pretty darned horrific. The Holocaust reaped 12M victims. Stalin, maybe 20M; Mao in his Great Leap annihilated 30-45M. Did these deaths ‘overwhelm our judgment’ then or now? Did we push for ‘societal change’ in response to those atrocities?
How ’bout WW2 with maybe 90M dead? or the Mongol Conquests with 40M? The Thirty Years War with 6M?
As always, those close to the dead, mourn. Those in proximity to the horror are repulsed and outraged. And all the rest of us tend to very quickly dismiss & forget. If, that is, we ever recognized the horror in the first place.
So yes, in Buffalo, just the other day, a garden-variety sociopath, immersed in his own perverted worldview, murdered 10 innocents. And we were horrified, outraged, and appalled, as any decent person would be.
But we forget that on that same day, averages being what they are, another 52 people were also murdered. 52 additional tragedies, families torn apart….and nary a mention on the news that night because — after all — it was just, in a very sad sense, ‘business as usual’: people killing people (though typically only 1 or 2 at a time).
We forget that death is death; murder, murder…tragedy, tragedy. The fact that 10 innocents were killed in a grocery store is particularly horrific because of the count and the mundane nature of the crime scene. But otherwise these 10 deaths are no more or less horrific than any of the other 52 that day or the 20K last year.
We need to remember that truth (as cold and unforgiving as it is), and temper our justifiable anger and outrage by the understanding that terrible things happen every day; every day people die….and no, the world itself on any kind of significant moral scale will not ever change. All we can do is what we’ve always done which is try to make our own little portion of it that much better.
Why wouldn’t the Left was to recreate a George Floyd moment? Look what they’ve obtained since: the Senate, the House, the Presidency, every Fortune 500 board, and they have caused the entire media establishment to completely abandon objective standards of truth.
the George Floyd riots were a disaster to everyone else, but to wealthy, powerful progressives, they were the political high point of the last 4 decades.
The neo-Marxist ruling elites need perpetual racism to exist in America. That’s why they’ve done all they can to keep blacks in a constant state of misery. Happy proletarians aren’t good fodder for the socialist cause. Ayaan has demonstrated clearly that “systemic racism” is just a social construct of the Left to drive the narrative – which is actually a massive conspiracy theory – that America is built upon the foundations of white supremacy. Shortly after the tragic Buffalo shooting occurred, President Biden stated that such “hate” was “a stain on the soul of America.” Once again, the specter of systemic racism and white supremacy was thrust into the forefront of the political conversion. They don’t want racism to go away, which is why they inject identity politics into everything.
The only way for the Black population to get out of their current predicament is for them to do it themselves. No amount of hand-outs, affirmative action and victimization will help. They have to decide to do it themselves.
The US is far and away the mist popular destination for migrants, with some 51 million foreign born nationals, nearly four times as many as any other country in the world.
If reason prevailed in public debate around “systemic racism” this fact would give the lie to the notion and its political value. But it doesn’t.
Thank you, MS Ayaan for this thoughtful essay. As someone quipped BLM now stands for Buy Large Mansions. In the first thirty years of my life, I had three identity labels. It was all a joke to me. Now some entities treat people based on their identity labels.
Amen sister and thankyou
Great Replacement theory.
Ukraine v Russia
Whites Killing Whites
Don’t actually need others to do it.
Just read this in the Wall Street Journal, but pay no attention to what’s really going on.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/massacre-as-usual-in-chicago-shootings-crime-lori-lightfoot-11652736495?mod=hp_opin_pos_2
The unfortunate fact in this article is that the shooter identified himself as a fascist and most people don’t understand that fascism is a socialist ideology. The media ignores it and paints the shooter as “right-wing”. He wasn’t, but in the US the fake news leftist media is a DNC propaganda machine and it is used to divide us. It works because most people in the US are simply ignorant and too lazy to learn the truth.
Amazing: not one commenter addresses the murderer or his right wing manifesto by name or deed. Lot of complaining about busted white butts though.
Police do kill more blacks than whites…per capita. Overall, as there are more whites than blacks, more whites are killed but your statement is deeply misleading.
When a killer who describes himself “as a fascist, a white supremacist and an anti-Semite” has gunned down ten innocent black people in Buffalo, it’s a perverse decision to commission a piece from Ayaan Hirsi Ali (who approves of the Iraq invasion) on the myth of American racism. Surely a more apt response to this tragic event should have been an exploration of fascism, white supremacy and anti-Semitism in America?
It could seem that way. On the other hand fascism, white supremacy and anti-Semitism are regularly explored, and well recognised, and there are specific, well funded units in the police & security services tackling it. The shocking deaths from mass shootings, terrible as they are, are tiny compared with everyday killings (20,000 a year in the US, half of whom are African-American), and suicides (2nd highest cause of death for teenagers).
We need more reporting of everyday truths, not sensational outliers. Moreover, over-reporting of race-based, school shootings has been shown to encourage it.
There’s plenty of that in the MSM, go read. If you’re reading Unherd, it’s because there’s a place for an alternative and perhaps pertinent point of view, especially when based on good research.
The author of the piece italicises “systemic racism” in her first paragraph for a sensible reason: her intent to keep back from “monocausal explanations” and “today’s dependency on white guilt for recognition and support”. She then goes on to explain the “divisive rhetoric” that seeps quickly into the American consciousness that IS a major problem that has affected most of America. The author had been at a conference in Dallas among fellow black intellectuals and professionals at the time of the atrocity. Through this article, she intends to make clear to the “many in the media” how worthwhile it is to guard against the knee-jerk reaction, even the opportunistic knee-jerk reaction, as I read it, of tarring a nation, of the wickedness of maligning a whole society. (There are plentiful examples of a more extreme tarring so in 1930s Germany). Indeed, in the piece, she and her distinguished colleagues quickly understood that it was NOT the “phantom of systemic racism” that was holding back black Americans. Considering the deep emotions an atrocity in Buffalo will produce in people, it must have been of some reassurance to the author of the piece that in her being among friends of hers, at the time, she was well placed to see through the emotional, never mind misleading, press headlines that would inevitably come out. There is no doubt there is fascism, that there are white supremacists, and that there is anti-semitism, in America. There is no doubt racism exists. Perhaps these malignities are more evident in a cosmopolitan country such as America that is continually under the microscope. Is the bigger picture ever seen though?
there is no myth, ali ,and martin bollis and other conservatives continue with this denial about racism and the racist replacement theory , —- your denial will ensure that there will be an enviornment for another racist rampagne—- white supremacy is alive and well in america ,