This week, Shuuko “Forever 17!” Komi and her tongue-tied daughter Shouko, from the most excellent manga (and now anime!) Komi Can’t Communicate. Ceterum autem censeo Silicon Valley esse delendam.
East Berlin honors Karl Liebnecht and Rosa Luxemburg, 1988
Because I am a history buff, the YouTube algorithm shows me all kinds of stuff — the history of Carthage, the Anglo-Saxon invasion of post-Roman Britain, the Stuart dynasty, etc. — about obscure topics that would be boring to most people, and which even most history buffs might not care much about. Usually I watch videos like these on my phone at bedtime and fall asleep during them, which can make for interesting dreams, narrated by some guy blabbering on about Cannae or whatever.
Saturday night, I watched (or rather, fell asleep watching) a series of videos about the 1918 German revolution. which is something I dare say 99% of Americans know nothing about. The Bolshevik Revolution was not the only Communist uprising in Europe at that time. There was also the short-lived reign of Bela Kun in Hungary and various failed revolutionary attempts in Germany, including the brief Communist coup in Bavaria in April-May 1919. Anyway, so I fell asleep watching this thing about the German revolution of 1918, and when I woke up early Sunday, I took a brief look at the third part of the series, “The Violent End of the German Revolution.” As is my wont, I became curious about who was producing this material, which was of a particular political theme, i.e., neo-Communism. As might be expected, most neo-Communists are young, and thus have no useful memory of what Soviet-era Communism actually was, or how difficult it was for the West to win the Cold War. Unless you lived through the 1960s and ’70s, a time when it seemed that Communism was ascendant, you have little appreciation of the heroic qualities that manifested themselves in the Reagan Revolution.
Neo-Communists, generally influenced by older leftists who were objectively pro-Soviet during the Cold War, refuse to accept the verdict of 20th-century history, and wish to believe that Communism can exist without producing the kind of totalitarian horrors it produced in Russia, China, Cambodia and elsewhere. It seemingly does not occur to them that the evils of 20th-century Communist regimes were not accidental, but rather that Communism always must, by its very nature, result in brutal dictatorship and widespread misery. To quote myself:
Five years after the Bolshevik Revolution, Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises predicted that the Soviet project was doomed to fail. In his classic work Socialism, Mises explained that the attempt to replace the market system with central economic planning could not succeed, because the planners could not possibly have the information necessary to make all the decisions which, in a market economy, are made by individuals whose needs and desires are reflected in prices: “The problem of economic calculation is the fundamental problem of Socialism.”
“Everything brought forward in favour of Socialism during the last hundred years,” Mises wrote in 1922, “in thousands of writings and speeches, all the blood which has been spilt by the supporters of Socialism, cannot make Socialism workable. … Socialist writers may continue to publish books about the decay of Capitalism and the coming of the socialist millennium; they may paint the evils of Capitalism in lurid colours and contrast with them an enticing picture of the blessings of a socialist society; their writings may continue to impress the thoughtless — but all this cannot alter the fate of the socialist idea.”
Undeterred by Mises’ criticism, the Soviet Union spent the next seven decades proving his prediction correct. By the time the Communist utopia collapsed in bankruptcy and disgrace, it seemed that everyone with two eyes and a brain understood the lesson: The Marxist-Leninist project was a complete failure and, as historians documented in The Black Book of Communism, tens of millions of people had died for this mistake, deliberately starved or slaughtered by totalitarian Communist governments. . . .
What Mises was saying was that Communism is doomed to failure simply because its basic economic idea is wrong. There is no feasible alternative to the market economy, and the sooner everyone accepts this truth, the happier they will be. Whether your own individual fortune within the market economy may be judged a success or a failure, while certainly a matter of great interest to you personally, is irrelevant to the larger truth that a society organized on the basis of economic liberty ultimately produces greater prosperity and, as is said, “a rising tide lifts all boats.”
It should not be necessary for me to elaborate this explanation much further. Anyone can read Mises’ Socialism or Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom or any of another dozen books I could recommend, and come to the same conclusion. I have nothing original to say on the subject, and can only lament that so few people seem to be interested in understanding why economic freedom is so essential. The real point is that neo-Communists are willing to ignore not only the nightmare reality of what Communist regimes inflicted upon their subjects in the 20th century, but also ignore the work of Mises, et al., in explaining why it was all doomed from the start. Instead, as Mises said a century ago, these latter-day Bolshevik wannabes continue to “paint the evils of Capitalism in lurid colours,” as if such critiques suffice to justify their radicalism and their fanciful dreams of life in a Marxist utopia.
Which brings me to Jonas Ceika, who has more than 200,000 subscribers on the YouTube channel where I saw his videos about the German revolution of 1918. There seems to be zero biographical material about Ceika except what he’s published himself. He is a philosophy student in Norway whose first YouTube efforts were Marxist analyses of pop culture (e.g., Shrek in 2017), but who really hit the big time in 2018 with a video titled, “Jordan Peterson doesn’t understand postmodernism.” See, this is the way lefties gain clout online, by attacking popular figures on the right, and Ceika’s attack on Peterson has gained more than 900,000 views. What Ceika’s audience wants to believe is that Peterson has been “debunked” — refuted, exposed as a fraud — and I’m sure this video suffices to convince people who don’t like Peterson that they are justified in their dislike. In other words, Ceika targets his audience’s susceptibility for confirmation bias.
Well, if you’re foolish enough to believe in Communism, you’re likely to believe anything, and Ceika has built an audience of the naïve and gullible, for whom his version of the failed German revolution is perhaps definitive — The True History™ — and this is unfortunate in many ways. Ceika wants his audience to believe that it was a bad thing that Liebnecht and Luxembourg failed to bring about a Soviet Germany in 1918, that the radical faction of German socialists were the heroes of this particular drama, and that the Left in Germany was guiltless in the subsequent rise of Hitler. But by their rejection of electoral democracy, attempting to seize power by armed uprising in mimicry of what the Bolsheviks had done in Russia, the German Communists legitimized revolutionary violence, an example which Hitler and his associates subsequently imitated for their own purposes. There were many factors involved in the rise of Hitler, of course, but the radicalism the German Left was certainly an important part of the formula for national catastrophe.
By the way, for some reason, Ceika doesn’t want his photograph to appear anywhere online, but he was willing to do a video interview from which I was able to grab this image. You’re welcome.
Is there a famine in Norway? A meth epidemic? It’s a cheap shot to mock Ceika’s emaciated appearance, I suppose, and so I’ll instead return to mocking his politics. He exhibits a tendency to think of people categorically, using bourgeois as an epithet for anything he considers bad, as for example the moderate democratic socialists in early 20th-century Germany, and speaking of “the masses” when describing those whom Communists aspired to lead to revolution. Ceika uses the phrase “class consciousness” without irony when speaking of workers who supported Communism, as if it were self-evident that their interests would be best served by a Marxist-Leninist revolution.
Perhaps there are many youth who’ve had the privilege of growing up in the post-Soviet world who share Ceika’s romantic view of Rosa Luxemburg and other Communist revolutionaries, much like all those idiot American college kids wearing Che Guevara T-shirts and voting for Bernie Sanders. The reality of what Communism was — a formula for tyranny and mass murder — is ignored so as to enable these young dreamers to imagine what they wish Communism could have been, and perhaps what their hoped-for future revolution will bring into being.
Brenda Poulos remembers working in Kenosha last Friday when she received a series of texts from her son.
“I know he’s not supposed to use his phone in school, so the fact that he texted me was already, something’s up right,” Poulos said. “He said, ‘Mom, something’s going on at school. They fired our teacher and something bad is going on.”
Poulos’ son, Ethan, is a seventh-grade student at John Long Elementary. He told WISN 12 News he was in math class on Friday [May 12] when his teacher became upset and started making threats after discovering a swastika drawn in a notebook.
“Five seconds later, he went on this ramble about how this was a disgrace to his people and how he wanted to scorch Earth on us and how he was apparently going to cause pain on all our families,” Ethan said. “How he’d send his daughter to our house with a baseball bat and that he had 17 guns and he wasn’t afraid to use them.”
“I was scared. I had never heard a teacher say that to me or any kids before,” Ethan said.
According to a criminal complaint filed Monday afternoon in Ozaukee County Circuit Court, David Schroeder, 46, of Grafton, was charged with terrorist threats — create risk of causing result.
According to Assistant District Attorney Benjamin Lindsay, the school never contacted law enforcement. Lindsay said police only became involved more than an hour after the incident, when parents contacted police saying they were concerned their children weren’t safe with Schroeder in the community and with admitted access to guns. After police arrived at the school, the entire class was sent home early.
“It was chaos. There were a lot of kids in office area, panicked parents coming to get their kids,” said Sgt. Sean Fuerstenberg with the Grafton Police Department.
Police said they contacted Schroeder, who voluntarily turned himself in and was arrested on Friday.
In court Monday, the prosecutor said he was particularly concerned that Schroeder mentioned that he had a number of firearms.
Judge Paul Malloy, who is presiding over the case, did not take Schroeder’s actions lightly.
“The time when somebody can blow off steam and have a meltdown, that bird has flown a long time ago,” Malloy said.
According to the complaint, Schroeder told the students that he was Jewish, that “all Jews have guns and that he had 17 guns in his basement and that he would ‘F’ them up.”
Schroeder bonded out of jail on Tuesday. As a condition of his bail, he was ordered to first turn over any dangerous weapons to the Ozaukee County Sheriff’s Office.
The principal indicated to police that Schroeder was already under investigation for “other concerning or inappropriate behavior towards students,” and the school district had already determined his contract would not be renewed for next year.
In other words, this guy had been a known problem before he went berserk in the classroom. And just by the way, if drawing swastikas in your notebook was some kind of human-rights violation, basically every kid in my childhood schools would have been under investigation. Our fathers’ generation had fought World War II, which was a subject of lots of TV shows (e.g., Combat!) and movies (e.g., The Longest Day) that we watched as kids, so we were fairly saturated with that stuff about fighting the “Krauts” (as the Germans were habitually referred to in the G.I. slang dialogue of those old movies). Because a swastika is a simple thing to draw (as opposed to say, a Stuka dive bomber or a Tiger tank), basically every schoolboy drew them, in notebooks, on desks, etc. It had no deeper meaning in our minds. Certainly the boys who drew swastikas — and I mean, literally every boy did, back in the 1960s and ’70s — did not intend it as signifying support for totalitarianism, or sympathy toward Germany, least of all Jew-hating. It was like drawing Batman (another favorite schoolboy doodle) or hot rods, just stuff that boys did, without any political intent. But that was long ago, in what may now be viewed as a Golden Age of political incorrectness, when a popular comedy on TV was Hogan Heroes, with the Nazis played for laughs.
(By the way, I’m sure every guy my age grew up assembling models of various WWII tanks and planes. You could order a Tiger tank model kit or a Stuka bomber kit via Amazon, but you’ll also need to order some Testors paint and glue. DO NOT SNIFF THE GLUE! Because I have to tell you kids everything . . .)
Usual deadlines for the usual weekend posts; will most likely have time for these after a couple grueling days of travel. For that matter, since time is tight today, this is a condensed version of the usual linkagery. Ceterum autem censeo Silicon Valley esse delendam.
Tomorrow and Thursday are travel days, Wednesday I’ll be at the National Security Site most of the day, and Friday looks to be busy as well, so blogging may be sporadic.
Silicon Valley delenda est.
Having long ago earned my dot on the SPLC “hate map,” there’s a certain reputational risk if I were to complain too loudly about racism, because I’ve carefully staked out a position in defense of what I consider a basic liberty — your constitutional Right to Hate.
Understand that I am not pro-hate, per se. But if the First Amendment means anything, it means that the government cannot engage in coercion in matters of personal opinion. Our freedom of religion, for example, means that I am required to tolerate beliefs that I consider 100% wrong — Mormonism, for example. It is probably unnecessary for me to go into detail about just how wrong Mormonism is, but the point is I can’t prevent them from promulgating their errors and, if this tolerance must be extended to the deluded followers of that preposterous fraud Joseph Smith, then why make a fuss about the followers of Louis Farrakhan?
As an American, you are free to hate whoever you want, which means that I can’t stop Professor Sylvia Chong from hating crackers like me:
UVA prof casts doubt
on White and Asian people dating
A University of Virginia professor recently warned students about relationships between White and Asian people.
During a talk entitled “COVID-19: The Asian American Experience” sponsored by the University of Virginia’s Kappa Delta Phi and Sigma Psi Zeta sororities, professor Sylvia Chong discussed anti-Asian racism in the era of COVID-19, as student newspaper The Cavalier Daily reports.
Chong referred to an earlier talk at the University of Virginia that referenced the Page Act of 1875 — a bill which limited the migration of Chinese women into the United States.
“Even for white feminists, Asian American femininity is often something they contrast themselves against,” Chong commented to the university newspaper. “Perhaps they don’t always say this about Asian Americans, but they certainly denigrate and exoticize Asian women abroad as victims of their patriarchal societies, victims of capitalism, victims of poverty and war.”
Among other topics, Chong discussed the recent Atlanta spa shooting, in which several Asian-American women were murdered.
“How can we be Asian American females and access… the features of other forms of femininity such as sexual agency at the same time that we also then protect our rights against exploitation?” Chong asked students.
However, Chong moved onto the event’s implications for University of Virginia students’ interracial relationships — particularly, the relationships between White males and Asian females.
Chong reportedly referenced former “Home Alone” star Macaulay Culkin’s appearance on “The Joe Rogan Experience,” during which he expressed excitement about having mixed-race babies with partner Brenda Song.
“It’s going to be adorable — a bunch of Sean Lennons running around the house, that’s what I’m looking for,” Culkin told Rogan.
“I’m not trying to [denigrate] anyone’s relationships, but how do you know that you’re in a relationship for who you are, rather than what someone imagines you to be?” asserted Chong in response. “Are you seeing me? Are you seeing the shadow of the Page Act? Are you seeing Miss Saigon with the college degree?”
Well, that’s rather tame stuff. Professor Chong seems to have been referencing “Yellow Fever” fetishism — the whole Geisha girl fantasy, the mystery of the exotic Orient kind of thing — and so what? You expect me, an SPLC-certified “white supremacist,” to be offended by this?
Nope, not gonna get worked up about that. On the other hand, something left out of that story, but reported by the UVA student paper:
One student asked Chong about her thoughts on whether the University is adequately supporting the APIDA [Asian Pacific Islander Desi American] community. In response, Chong announced that she would be part of a group going to talk to University President Jim Ryan on this issue. Her hope is to hire more professors specialized in Asian American studies, as she is one of five professors affiliated with the APAS program.
“I wish that race were not so tokenized so that people thought if you have one, you have enough,” she said. “I never think that hiring these kinds of professors is at the expense of other minorities — I think it should be at the expense of the majority.”
NOW HOLD THE F**K UP THERE, LADY!
What you are saying is that university hiring is, and should be, done on a basis of racial quotas and that, in order to increase the quota of Asians in this zero-sum game, you’re going to eliminate jobs for white people.
Why in the world is everybody trying to make a thing about what Professor Chong said about interracial dating when — right there in the same story — you’ve got her telling the blunt truth about what “diversity” actually means on university campuses? See, this is where the line needs to be drawn. Instead of getting upset about someone saying something that could be interpreted as “racist” — who cares? not me — what we should be focusing on is the actual injustice of quota hiring, especially when such regimes are instituted and operated by government entities like state universities. The weird thing about Professor Chong’s remark is that Asian students are actually the ones being harmed most by racial quotas at elite universities, where “diversity” turns out to be merely a code word for favoritism toward black and Hispanic students. It seems she thinks she can deflect anti-Asian bias by encouraging other minorities to blame whitey, which is why she’s ax-grinding about an 1875 law that most people never heard of: “Oh, please don’t hate us for getting higher SAT scores — we’re victims of historic injustice, too!”
No, ma’am. Don’t think you can play that game as if we’re too dumb to see what you’re doing. Either the university is a meritocracy, or it’s not, and if you think you can split the difference, using wedge tactics to divide and conquer, you’re apt to learn a hard lesson about consequences. When that big Wheel o’ Karma turns, don’t come crying to me.
