Ordinary People

 

Consider, by way of illustration, Eric Hobsbawm, the famous, much feted, and unrepentantly Marxist historian. No one would feel personally threatened by him at a social gathering, where he would be amusing, polite, charming, and accomplished; if you had him to dinner, you wouldn’t have to count the spoons afterward, even though he theoretically opposes the idea of private wealth. In short, there would be no reason to suspect that he was about to commit a common crime against you. In this sense, he is what one might call a moderate Marxist.

But Hobsbawm has stated quite openly that, had the Soviet Union managed to create a functioning and prosperous socialist society, 20 million deaths would have been a worthwhile price to pay; and since he didn’t recognize, even partially, that the Soviet Union was not in fact on the path to such a society until many years after it had murdered 20 million of its people (if not more), it is fair to assume that, if things had turned out another way in his own country, Hobsbawm would have applauded, justified, and perhaps even instigated the murders of the very people to whom he was now, under the current dispensation, being amusing, charming, and polite. In other words, what saved Hobsbawm from committing utter evil was not his own scruples or ratiocination, and certainly not the doctrine he espoused, but the force of historical circumstance. His current moderation would have counted for nothing if world events had been different.

Theodore Dalrymple.

 

One of the most depressing books I have ever read is Ordinary Men, Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland. Based upon the detailed records of one the Nazi extermination squads in Poland, the book details much about the type of men who made up the unit.  It's tempting to thing about such men as being vicious psychopathic thugs with a long history of anti social personality traits, but the chilling and sobering truth is that many of the men who executed women and children in cold blood were just ordinary people in peacetime.   People who would sit next to you on the bus, smile at your children, do your plumbing and excuse themselves if they bumped into you, could, if put in the right circumstances, put the a bullet through your spouse's brain. What made the fact the more horrifying is the fact that many of these men did these things voluntarily, even when given a choice to opt out. When the war ended, many of them to returned to live out the rest of their lives as upstanding local citizens.

The book came to mind as I trawled through my X feed. Post after post celebrated the death of Charlie Kirk, and while the usual leftist suspects were represented, what shocked me the most is how many ordinary looking people celebrated it. I can understand schadenfreude but healthy societies have always seen it as a guilty pleasure and something one should be ashamed to have. The celebration of it, really marked someone as being of vulgar manners and declassé. However in post after post, Pilots, nurses, teachers, soldiers, mental health workers, etc. People not dressed in the usual garb of antifa or the degenerate,  but people who looked like polite bourgeoisie celebrated his demise.  

Much of the Right's talk about the decline of our society is focused on the "elites" but the reality is that these men could not achieve their strategic objectives with out co-operation a large numbers of the managerial class who live polite, affluent and well disciplined lives. What has been most disquieting to realise is that the people who could be our future torturers and executioners, given the right circumstances, are people who we are politely rubbing shoulders with us now. The whole leftist juggernaut needs to be seen as a pyramid of elites supported by a base of fellow travelers.

I was never a big fan of Charlie Kirk and did not pay much attention to his posts. I always felt that his business model was naive. The idea that you could rationalise and debate your point and make your opponent change his mind through the force of facts and good argument was, in my opinion contrary to lived human experience. What if your opponent doesn't respect facts or argument, what if they simply wanted to punch you out and dominate you. What if fantasy was preferential to reality. His socaratic style of argument was ultimately silenced by a bullet through his neck. And while the Left, I believe made a massive miscalculation, the reality is that Charlie Kirk is dead. His death celebrated by many of the "polite" people we live with and who, if given the chance, would gladly fill the ranks of Reserve Police Battalion 101 or its modern equivalent.

These are dangerous times indeed.